


The Meaning of the Word

by Justkeeptrekkin



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Asexual Aziraphale (Good Omens), Asexual Crowley (Good Omens), Godparents Aziraphale and Crowley (Good Omens), M/M, Undercover as Professors, they pretend they can lecture at Oxford University, with varying degrees of success
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-02
Updated: 2020-03-08
Packaged: 2021-02-27 22:35:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 22,568
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22533355
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Justkeeptrekkin/pseuds/Justkeeptrekkin
Summary: Heaven and Hell may be finished with Crowley and Aziraphale, but they still have plans for Adam. And so, when they discover that their respective head-offices plan to strike up Armageddon once again, Crowley and Aziraphale go under cover to keep an eye on Adam at uni.This is the story of how they averted the apocalypse for a second time by becoming lecturers at the University of Oxford.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 177
Kudos: 502





	1. Chapter 1

In many ways, the world has changed. 

After the apocalypse, Atlantis became a new holiday destination. Its visitors had to go by ship- all major airlines were shut down due to global warming riots. The sky turned bluer, not a single stream of airplane fumes in sight. The dodo reemerged from extinction. Australia suddenly saw its wildlife population replenished. Debates over that giant, solar energy power-plant in the Sahra were finally put to an end, petrol becoming increasingly redundant. Oxfordshire suddenly had a much more reliable (zero carbon-footprint) public transport system. 

Jeremy Clarkson stopped writing memoirs. Piers Morgan woke up one morning and decided he didn’t need to share his opinion anymore. Greta Thunberg won. Lost remains of the library of Alexandria were found, Malaria treatment became immediately available for everyone who needed it, and for a moment- just for a moment- the echo of bullets and bombs rang silent. 

Amazon started paying its taxes. 

The world almost came to an end, and in many ways, it did change. In the biggest ways possible, it changed. The smaller things, however- many of those things stayed the same. 

Aziraphale sits at his desk. Despite all that he’s learned from Agnes Nutter, he has let his cocoa grow cold. He stares at the spines of a set of children’s books. They had miraculously appeared on his shelves when he returned to his shop that day- a series that he hadn’t owned before the apocalypse. He stares at those books now, one hand gripping his knee, one hand on the receiver of his phone. 

The monotone ring of the line fills the gap between his ear and the phone. 

It’s almost six pm. Which means that he and Crowley will soon have their customary phone conversation, deciding on a place to meet and have dinner together. They’ll talk, they’ll eat (Aziraphale will, at least) and they’ll drink (they’ll both certainly be doing that). They’ll sober up. Yes, they’ll part ways, just as it has always been. 

Aziraphale holds the phone away from his ear. He hesitates.

He almost jumps out of his corporeal form when he hears the door open, the bell above it tinkling cheerily. 

“Erm- I’m sorry, but we’re closed!” He calls out.

Footsteps echo somewhere to his left, their author concealed by walls of books. 

The irritation in his voice couldn’t be clearer when he says, “I’m sorry, but we really are closed.”

“Aziraphale.”

The sound of his name, the way he says it; it bobs around nauseously in his stomach like an ice-cube in a glass of water. He stands up abruptly from his desk. “Gabriel.”

The archangel Gabriel, looking as clinical as ever, purple eyes as measuring as ever. Aziraphale tries to resist the urge to straighten out his waistcoat, and fails. 

There was a time, when Gabriel would pay his visits, that he would stride in and announce his business unabashedly, voice loud and presence jolly-well known. There would be idle pleasantries, heavy-handed methods of avoiding a human audience. Now, Gabriel simply comes to a stop a few feet away from Aziraphale, puts his hands in his pockets, and rocks on the balls of his feet like a disappointed line-manager who’s been ordered to give him a disciplinary. 

It makes Aziraphale suddenly, foreignly, furious. 

“Aziraphale. You need to come up to the office.”

Aziraphale opens his mouth, shuts it again and frowns. “You need _me_?”

“We don’t _need_ you, it’s-” Gabriel presses his lips together and tilts his head in annoyance. “Semantics. But then, I suppose you were always obsessed with the little details, weren’t you.” Aziraphale tries to retort. But he allows himself to be silenced, out of habit, by the hand that Gabriel raises to stop him. “Anyway, the, er, higher-ups requested that all angels be present for a meeting. Archangels, principalities and… traitors alike.”

“I…” 

A grandfather clock ticks, and it chimes six times. 

It’s sort of unbelievable. Unbelievable that after the millennia that Aziraphale was faithful to Heaven, they should forget it all so quickly. Unbelievable that he should take it so personally when they call him a traitor- when, in the cold light of day, he is. He betrayed their plan, quite consciously, after much debate. Unbelievable that he should still feel vulnerable to their sway, when they have so ceremoniously rejected him, and he them. 

But it’s the small acts of rebellion that make Aziraphale feel better, more whole again. He’s learned that from humans. 

“I…” he tries again, “...I resent that.”

Gabriel’s stare flickers. “Sure. Resent all you want.”

Aziraphale narrows his eyes. 

Gabriel looks to the ceiling. He points upwards. 

“Shall we?”

An imperious tilt of his chin, and he feels incrementally better. “If God has requested it, of course.”

He can practically hear Gabriel grinding his teeth at the disrespect- not many are so dismissive of an archangel’s authority- and Aziraphale smiles to himself as he follows him out the door. 

Hell’s meeting room has always been too small. It means that Crowley’s stuffed at the back, behind crowds of bog-demons and slug-demons, everyone squished together. The floors are sticky, it smells and no one can move for all the demons. Sort of like a nightclub. That’s part of what makes this meeting room Hellish. 

Over the heads of the crowd, he sees the glass pane that separates their kind from the high ranking demons. Hastur; Dagon; Beelzebub; Belphegor; Mammon; Berrith. Hastur is popping up a folding chair with little success, trying to kick the legs into place and screaming with mad fury as it won’t cooperate. There’s no Ligur to explain things like faulty Ikea furniture to him, now. Next to him, Beelzebub is reclined in their seat- one wouldn’t think such a relaxed lean were possible in a flimsy, fold-out chair. 

Crowley used to occupy the chair between them.

He sighs. He tries to look at his watch but he can barely raise his arm in the tight space. Hastur said that everyone had to come, but Crowley sees no reason why he ought to be present, too. He has better things to do. 

It must be past six now. 

“Alright alright, we won’t keep you waiting any longer.”

That’s Dagon, of course. Rallying the troops, as they always do. Crowley can’t see them very well now that someone’s horns are in the way of the view, but he’s listened to them drone on and on long enough to recognise their voice anywhere. He leans against the wall of the meeting room and exhales between pursed lips, already bored rigid. 

“In short- we’ve received word. From our Dark Lord Satan.”

A buzz of interest hums throughout the tightly packed corridor. Behind the glass pane, Crowley can make out Dagon holding their hands behind their back, Beelzebub drumming their fingers impatiently against their leg. 

Crowley frowns to himself. “Interesting,” he mutters. 

Because recently, Satan’s been about as M.I.A. as God. Since his son so sorely disappointed him, he decided he wasn’t worth the effort- and that he couldn’t be bothered with any of the rest of them, either. The apple really doesn’t fall far from the tree, it seems. And Crowley knows his apple trees well. 

But now that Satan’s got something to say- he has to admit, his curiosity is piqued.

Aziraphale takes his place at the back of the meeting room. The floor is polished marble. The ceilings seem endlessly high, and it is windowless, unlike the rest of Heaven. It resembles the Excel centre of East London. Aziraphale has only ever been in this room once, back in 33AD, and it didn’t look like this then. No- back then, it was an open field. He isn’t sure when Heaven lost its charm and became so clinical.

An angel he doesn’t recognise takes the empty seat next to him. Aziraphale winces a polite smile, shuffles his chair up a bit to give them room. He finds a white sheet of paper shoved directly under his nose. 

Michael stands in front of him, curling their lip. “Here. The agenda for the day.”

How Michael still has a job here, Aziraphale doesn’t know. Probably because no one would believe him if he told anyone else what he saw in Hell at Crowley’s trial. 

“Thank you,” he replies primly. And though he can’t believe it himself, he snatches it from Michael’s hand. Michael sneers, continues along the aisle. Aziraphale smiles, feeling a little smug; he’s enjoying this rebellious side to himself. 

And then he reads what’s in front of him, and his hand flies to his chest in shock.

_9:00AM Tea and Coffee  
9:20AM Introductions from Gabriel and Sandalphon: What Does Heaven Mean to You?  
9:45AM Past Apocalypses: Evaluating Our Work  
10:15AM Rethinking the Apocalypse: What Went Wrong?  
11:00AM Apocalypse Now: How Can We Make the Next One Smarter?  
11:30AM: Tea break_

Aziraphale sighs behind his hand. “Oh, _no_.”

“Silence!” Dagon orders, and the chaos hushes. “The Dark Lord has told us to stand firm… to be prepared... to _take up arms once more!_ ”

The crowd explodes. There’s the roar of beasts and the thudding of feet stomping against the floor. Crowley feels it vibrate through his body and not in the fun way. 

“This can’t be happening,” Crowley says quietly, shaking his head. “Oh. Oh, no, no, no, no.”

“Ladies and gents.” 

Gabriel’s cool voice echoes through the vast meeting room, and Aziraphale simply stares at the neat, typed-up agenda in his hand. 

“Thank you all for being here- hey, Kamael, good to see you again, thanks for coming- first off, just to introduce ourselves, I know a few of the saints in here are new. Welcome to the club! I’m the Archangel Gabriel… thank you, thank you, aha… and this is Sandalphon, who, you know, I don’t know what I’d do without… no really, Sandalphon, you’re just great, you’re amazing. To all our newbies, don’t worry, we don’t bite.”

A round of polite titters. Aziraphale looks up in disbelief, dropping the agenda to the floor. 

Back in Hell, Dagon holds up their hands in authority, and in praise. 

“Demons! Incubi! Spectra! Our Dark Lord’s son, the Prince of Hell, may still come into his own! The prophecy may still be fulfilled, the word of John of Patmos may come to fruition, and our chance to take our place on Earth and make it the tenth circle of Hell may _still be ours...!_ ”

“Now, onto the important stuff,” Gabriel announces, standing behind a perfectly white lectern. “The apocalypse. Last time didn’t go so great, huh.”

Some more polite laughter, with a pointed ripple of awkward murmuring. Aziraphale feels his face burn. Either he’s imagining that everyone’s staring at him, or they really are turning around in their uncomfortable function-room seats to stare at him. 

“Well, no matter, because the secret to a Happy Heaven is to _learn_ from our mistakes. Am I right? Now, we’ve heard some intel recently that tells us that we’re in with another chance at getting this right. Which is why, today, we’re going back to the drawing board…”

“...For the age of our Prince of Hell, He-Who-Is-Merciless, has reached its solar eighteenth cycle- and his power is now stronger than ever before! So let us be vigilant! Let us be bold! And let us reclaim what is rightfully ours!”

Gabriel takes a little remote from his jacket pocket and a PowerPoint presentation starts up against the white-washed wall. 

**LET’S TALK ABOUT THE APOCALYPSE: TAKE TWO!**

Crowley doesn’t stay long enough to see if Dagon has any other rhetorical flourishes to peacock in front of their crowd. He winds through the zoo of demons and turns up his jacket collar in the damp, grimacing as he feels the weight of the world on his shoulders once more. 

Aziraphale’s chair scrapes loudly against the floor as he stands up and leaves. He feels a thousand cold, gold eyes watching him. He pushes through the doors and takes the escalators back down to Earth, a cold sweat building. 

Crowley kicks the apartment door down. It swings open and slams against the wall. 

“Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, _FUCK_!” he yells to the empty apartment. 

It’s been seven years since he’d last been summoned back down to Hell. Seven, blissful years of drinking, sleeping, and figuring out how Netflix works with Aziraphale. Seven, miraculous years without a boss. Self-employed for a while, as he was trying to figure out how to let a day go by without causing some minor, demonic annoyance. (For the first few weeks, Crowley kept on miracling the best dishes on menus out-of-stock, kept making builders do their work too early on Sunday mornings, purely out of force of habit.) These past seven years, he’s been enjoying an early retirement. Today, he’d only agreed to go back through pure curiosity; he really wishes he hadn’t. 

It’s probably a good thing that he found out, though. Good for humanity, if they can figure out how to get through this. Crowley reckons he should feel more frightened, more angry, more incensed. But he doesn’t; he simply feels resigned. 

He’s always felt that this is all too good to be true. 

Hopping onto his desk, legs dangling, he reaches to pick up the phone. It rings before his hand get there. 

Crowley recoils from it in confusion, wrinkling his nose. Then, eventually, picking up the receiver: “Who is it?”

“Crowley- it’s me. We, er- we have a situation.”

He has no idea why he asked who it was. There’s only one person who’d ever ring him, apart from cold-call centers. “You’re telling me. I just got back from Hell.”

“Oh, did you? Interesting.”

“Interesting?”

“I just got back from Head Office myself.”

“Ah. So, you’ve heard.”

Aziraphale sighs on the other end of the line, his voice crackling a little with poor reception. “Yes. Gabriel seems to think that there’s another opportunity to try the apocalypse again. Four Horsemen and all. He argued that the plan wasn’t destined to be fulfilled the first time, that maybe that was God’s way of giving us a trial run.”

“Bollocks.”

“It was utter rot, Crowley, and I simply couldn’t stay. I left after the third slide of his presentation.”

Crowley grimaces. Heaven do love their technology, he’s heard. He wonders whether they realise that Crowley was the one who invented long, unnecessary PowerPoints. “We got a rousing speech ourselves. _Taking up arms once more_ , all- all that sort of thing.”

“Oh, Lord.”

“How- it’s- I mean, this is-” Crowley stumbles over his words at the best of times. But right now, when he’s feeling so helpless, face in his hands- “Angel, I don’t know what the solution to this is.”

Aziraphale fumbles on the other end. 

“It- it’s all-” Crowley growls at his inarticulacy. “It feels to fast, feels out of nowhere, feels weird. It’s all hot air, isn’t it? Really? I mean, everyone’s all just bobbing along and then Satan suddenly thinks, ‘oh, you know what, I think I’ll actually start giving a shit suddenly’?”

“I agree it does seem a little… unconvincing.”

“Yeah. _Yeah_ , it’ll be fine. I’m sure it’s fine, it’ll blow over I reckon,” Crowley babbles, ever the optimist. He’d always been the one to come up with the plans, and he’d been the one to tell Aziraphale it was all going fine when they were raising the wrong bloody-well child, so it’s not as if that optimism has brought him much joy. “It’s fine. Yeah.”

“I do think there’s evidence of everyone overreacting just a little,” Aziraphale agrees. “Adam turning eighteen- there’s no real reason why he should be more powerful or suddenly more likely to cause a war now than when he was at eleven.”

“Or at thirteen, when he moved school.”

“Or sixteen, when he had to revise for his GCSEs.”

“That wasn’t great.”

“No. Anathema called me and told me all about how his garden had turned brown because he was bored of revising chlorophyll and photosynthesis.”

That does make Crowley just a little sad; for some reason, he’d sort of hoped Adam would have grown up with a touch of the green fingers. But then, he wasn’t the child that Nanny Ashtoreth and Brother Francis raised. 

“Yes, anyway, didn’t blow up the world then, he won’t now. What’s so different now?”

The line goes quiet. 

“Aziraphale?”

“Yes, I’m here.”

“What is it?” he asks slowly, cautiously.

“Nothing. No, nothing, I’m sure.”

“Spit it out, Aziraphale.”

A pause. “I was just thinking- all I can tell has happened is that Lucifer is interested in keeping an eye on Adam, yes? And, really, everyone’s just getting a bit excited and deciding it’s time to try Armageddon again, and… well, it seems like Gabriel’s interpreted it that way for his own agenda.”

“Yes, we’ve covered that, hadn’t we?”

There’s a tut, and Crowley can just imagine him roll his eyes. “Yes, yes, I’m simply saying it all to myself as a run up to the plan that I’m beginning to formulate. I think it might just work.” 

“Right. A plan. Look at you, coming up with a plan.”

“I can come up with plans too, sometimes, you know,” he complains, too whiny for it to be assertive. 

“Go on then. What do you think?”

“I think that we need to keep an eye on Adam ourselves. I think we should return to… plan A.”

It takes Crowley a moment to translate. “Godfathers.”

“Perhaps we can do what we originally intended all those years ago and watch over him. We’d let him know we’re coming, of course. But it might be easiest this way, just to make sure he doesn’t accidentally trigger something, if the rumours are true. Then, hopefully, when Heaven and Hell realise it’s a false alarm… it will all fall back into place.”

Crowley exhales slowly, pinches the bridge of his nose so his sunglasses are nudged up his face. 

When they’d sat in Aziraphale’s bookshop all those years ago and gotten uproariously drunk, it was because they knew Armageddon was looming. And Crowley had been the one to suggest the nanny and gardener idea. And that plan might have gone splendidly if they weren’t so hilariously inept. The problem of doing such a thing again is this- Crowley will have to spend every day in the same vicinity as Aziraphale. The first time he’d come up with the idea, he hadn’t anticipated how hard that would be. Now, Crowley knows how that sort of situation can take his feelings for Aziraphale, light them up in bright, neon bulbs and shove them directly in his face so he can’t ignore them, can’t help but be painfully aware of them. It’s the sort of situation that makes him daydream of gardening together; coming home from the shops and calling out ‘honey I’m home’; playing scrabble; falling asleep in front of an episode of Pointless together.

It’s pathetic. What’s more pathetic is that he doesn’t argue. Crowley has the self-preservation instinct of a lemming. 

“Right,” he agrees. “That’s probably our best option. Right- know where he is?” 

Aziraphale sighs, and it makes Crowley’s stomach twist. “Yes. Yes, I’m afraid I do.”

Oxford has earned its reputation for being beautiful. Matthew Arnold was right about the ‘dreaming spires’; the silhouettes of the buildings scrape the blue winter sky, heavenly in the way they seem to stretch out towards the clouds. Like they’re a part of Heaven’s architecture. Even if Aziraphale knows for a fact that they’re not.

Aziraphale has miracled most of his belongings to his new flat in Oxford. He stands at the stone steps of the entrance, on the street. Bicycles ring their bells, people pour out of the adjacent coffee shop, students chatter about their Christmas holidays. Across the road is a cafe, young people sat in window-seats with their laptops and scratching their heads. Tourists pour around Aziraphale, a river around a bemused stone. He tries to draw his thoughts together and wraps his scarf closer around his neck. 

The old, wide roads are filled with zero-carbon buses and bicycles. Aziraphale crosses a little haphazardly, throwing up an apologetic hand for holding up the traffic. The wind is being funnelled down the High Street, and as soon as he dives into the narrower, cobbled Turl Street, it’s more sheltered. 

It takes Aziraphale a moment to get his bearings; when he finds the cafe Crowley recommended, he sees the windows steamed up from the inside. Stepping in, the heat hits his skin immediately and the cold tingles away. The noise level is what he notices next- it’s extraordinarily loud. Filled with students working and talking. And there’s absolutely nowhere to sit. 

Then he spots him- Crowley, in the back left hand corner, waving nonchalantly and leaning against the wall. When Aziraphale goes over to meet him, he finds that the noise level suddenly drops: Crowley must have performed a little miracle to make their conversation private and more easily heard for the both of them. 

Aziraphale pulls off his scarf as he greets him. “When did Oxford get so…?”  
“Hideously busy? Dunno. Got touristy in the last century or so, like everywhere else. I haven’t been back since 1116.”

“It’s been a long time for me, too.”

Crowley remains reclined, one leg bouncing over the other, displaying a classic, Crowley fidget. There’s a small heel to his ankle boots- a pair Aziraphale doesn’t recognise. He drums his fingers against the table, a plain, white shirt rolled up to his sleeves. Over the top of said shirt, a pair of suspenders; and, yes, those look like pinstriped black trousers. What an extraordinary outfit. His sunglasses have changed shape, too- a circular style, similar to the ones he wore in the 60s. And his hair; his hair is long. Shoulder-length and wavy, tucked behind his ears, save a flickering strand of red that pours around his face. It reminds Aziraphale of that very first meeting. It reminds him of all the years they’ve shared. It makes him tongue tied and warm, and wonder why things between them are still the way they are; makes him wonder desperately why they hadn’t changed after the apocalypse. 

If only things _had_ changed between them. Then he could lean over and tuck that loose strand behind his ear.

“Your hair,” he remarks stupidly.

“ _Well spotted._ Thought I’d grow it out for the, er,” he waves his hand as he tries to find the words, “ _professor aesthetic_.” Aziraphale can see his throat move as he swallows. “Your outfit.”

Aziraphale merely holds onto his scarf, still standing behind his chair. Then, looking down at his outfit, he understands. Crowley is referring to his own new ‘look’, though it is nowhere near as sophisticated; a dark green, cable knit cardigan; cream corduroys; a blue shirt with the ubiquitous tartan bow-tie. And on top of it all, a camel coloured duffle coat. “Oh, yes. I felt the same urge to change things up a little.”

“No false teeth this time, though.”

Aziraphale tilts his head as an affirmative, and takes his seat. “I don’t think the disguise needs to go quite that far this time. Unless- do you?”

“No, no,” Crowley frowns. A waitress appears with two cups of tea, and Crowley mutters a quiet _cheers_ in sync with Aziraphale’s _thank you_. The demon starts to drop sugar lump after sugar lump into his mug. “So. Adam’s in Corpus Christi College.”

“Yes.”

“And he should be there by how- I texted him to let him know we’d be, er, making an appearance, so he knows we’re around.”

Aziraphale’s relieved. He’s refused to buy a mobile telephone, and he can’t imagine he’ll ever get one. “He’ll getting back into the swing of uni life, I should think.”

Crowley picks up his teacup, lets it hover in front of his mouth as he frowns above his sunglasses. 

Aziraphale watches him, hands around his own mug. “What is it?” he asks with a bit of apprehension. 

“Uni life,” Crowley mutters. “‘Spose that’s what all the fuss is about.”

“How do you mean?”

Crowley tilts his head back. Aziraphale finds himself suddenly transfixed by the way his hair pours down his neck, by the landscape of his profile. In this small, quaint tearoom, Crowley appears so out of place. And yet, this new look suits him, too. His lips part as he formulates his response, and it’s as if Aziraphale is watching this short moment in slow motion; Crowley drawing a breath to speak; the steam of his tea curling around his face; gold eyes visible through the peripheral gap of his sunglasses. 

Aziraphale clears his throat, for his own benefit. _Someone_ needs to snap him out of it. 

“University. It’s when things tend to go a bit tits up, isn’t it. For humans.”

Aziraphale blinks. Looks down at his earl gray tea. “Yes, those were my thoughts when I found out Adam was attending university at Oxford. It’s a stressful time, as far as I can tell, to leave home and be thrown into the academic lifestyle.”

“It’s also when they tend to drink stupid amounts of alcohol and make stupid decisions.”

“Well… yes, that’s also very true. But that’s why we’re here, Crowley, to help him if he’s struggling, let him know we’re here for him.”

“We can’t be there for him for all of it, though, can we?” Crowley argues, clicking his nails against his mug. “I mean, it’s not like Warlock. I can’t be changing his nappies and wiping up dribble- depends on how drunk he gets, I suppose…”

Aziraphale huffs and puts down his teacup decisively. “I thought you agreed that this was the best plan?” 

“I did, I did. But there’s only so much support two university lecturers can give, isn’t there? I mean, if Lucifer thinks that Adam might suddenly become even more all-powerful and trigger Armageddon for real, then how are we meant to be there to stop it? How are we meant to help him like this?”

Outside of their bubble of conversation, beyond Crowley’s miracle, the coffee shop customers chatter and _clack_ on their keyboards. A bell rings as someone’s order comes up ready, and a child draws a smiley face in the condensation of the window. 

“I don’t know,” Aziraphale admits, hands clasped in his lap. Crowley sighs slowly, balances his teacup precariously on his knee. “But- the fact that Adam is older is a benefit. He knows what he’s capable of, and he knows what’s right. He’s less impressionable. And he has friends. More than that- he knows us. And I should hope, after what we went through when he was eleven, that he should trust us if we tell him he’s in trouble.”

Crowley nods to himself, spinning the tea in his cup to make a little whirlpool. 

“And,” Aziraphale continues, “he’s missed us. You know he has.”

That conjures just the smallest smile from Crowley. Both of them have sat down and read the hand-written letters that Adam has posted to the bookshop over the years. Somehow, the boy had known that Aziraphale wouldn’t touch a phone or a computer, and had decided that addressing letters to them both at the bookshop would be a preferred form of contact. Aziraphale always recognises a letter from Adam- his scratchy, tiny handwriting on the envelope. He and Crowley will sit in the armchairs beside the fire together and read them, find out how he’s enjoying school, how his friends are, how life in rural Oxfordshire is. 

They’ve learned that Adam set up a debate club at his school in year 12. He managed to persuade his parents to get a second dog, who is called Mutt. Dog and Mutt get along wonderfully. They’ve learned that he enjoys camping and crickett, and that, unsurprisingly, he always does extraordinarily well in his exams. They’ve learned that he remembers them, and that he always will. It makes Aziraphale feel, truly, like his Godfather- like he’d raised Adam from the very start, too.

They both ponder this in relative quiet for a long moment. And then, Crowley sits up in his seat, stretches till his back clicks, and leans towards Aziraphale, elbows on the table. Biting his lip. Aziraphale shouldn’t really be aware that Crowley’s biting his lip, but it’s hard not to be, hard not to look. 

“So,” he says. “What’s your story?”

Aziraphale is still too stunned by the lip-biting thing to respond intelligently. “Sorry?”

“What’re you going to tell the university? The lecturers at the college, when they ask why you’re suddenly teaching?”

“Oh. Yes, well,” Aziraphale shuffles up straighter in his chair, enthused by the opportunity to share this. “My name is Ezra Fell.”

“Ezra,” Crowley remarks, brows shooting upwards. “Interesting choice.”

“Oh?”

“Your bookshop is A. Z. Fell- figured you’d pick a name beginning with A.”

That is a very good point, but he doesn’t want Crowley to know that this hadn’t crossed his mind at all, not even once. “Yes, well, even so. Ezra Fell- I attended Oxford myself, in the 1880s-”

“1980s, angel. Wrong century.”

“Oof- yes, I really must remember not to get that wrong. Anyway, I studied Classics and Ancient History in the 1980s, in Hartford college. And after I left, I went abroad and worked in Bologna, where I fell deeply in love with a very rich man who looked after me for many years whilst I studied for my doctorate.”

“How dramatic,” Crowley comments with an amused smile, licking the sugar off his teaspoon.

“And then he left he for someone younger and more handsome, so I travelled the world alone for some time, lecturing at various universities before winding up here, where I have been editing my book on the Ancient Greek philosophy on love.”

Crowley sits back in his seat, looks Aziraphale up and down with an appreciative smile. It makes him self-conscious, but not in a bad way. Bizarrely, he enjoys it. “Yeah,” Crowley says eventually. “Yeah, I’d buy that.”

Now, it’s Aziraphale’s turn to lean forward, elbows on table, hand cupping his face. As if they’re on a romantic date; as if they hadn’t simply gone back to the way things were before Armageddon, as if Crowley ever noticed Aziraphale attempting to flirt with puppy-dog eyes and side-glances. “And you, Crowley? What about your disguise?”

“Oh, this- it’s nothing,” he waves the teaspoon dismissively. “I couldn’t be bothered with an entire backstory, so I figured I’d explain any huge gaps in time between now and when I got my own degree- in 1982, of course,” he adds, pointing the spoon at Aziraphale, “by acting incredibly mysterious and dropping subtle hints that I worked for MI5.”

“Oh, how spectacular,” Aziraphale grins, clapping a little. “Oh, oh- if anyone asks, you must sprinkle in lots of romantic locations around the world that you had to visit for, _’work_ ’,” Aziraphale says, adding inverted commas with his fingers. 

Crowley laughs, head tilted back. “You were always so invested in the disguises.”

“My dear boy, so were you! Or have you forgotten the pencil skirts and lilting Scottish accent?”

He hums a happy laugh. “Oh, no, I haven’t forgotten. Still got those dress suits. Tailor made, those were.”

Aziraphale smiles, refills his cup with fresh tea. Taps the teaspoon against the rim. Then, with a small frown, “What will you be teaching?”

Crowley examines his nails. “Philosophy. Obviously. Adam’s taking it this term.”

“Of course,” Aziraphale nods. “I’ll be focusing on Classical literature. Naturally. Since Latin and Greek is Adam’s main degree subject.”

“Iliad?”

“Not this term, I’m afraid.”

“Shame. People need to set the record straight with the Achilles-Patroclus thing. Remember when everyone kept translating it so they were _cousins?_ ”

“Yes, dear,” Aziraphale smiles against the rim of his teacup. 

“Wrong. Just wrong. I mean, what the fuck is wrong with people? Christ, if they’d been there, they’d never deny it, silly bastards couldn’t keep their hands off each other.”

“Crowley?”

He looks up at him with slightly raised eyebrows, expectant and relaxed and hair down and just too beautiful in this silly little tearoom for Aziraphale to function- just for a moment. 

“Crowley,” he tries again. “Where are you living at the moment?”

He stares, like Aziraphale’s just said the stupidest thing in the world. “London, angel.”

“You don’t mean to tell me you’re commuting in for work every morning?”

“Bus to Oxford’s easy. And regular.”

“But it’s a coach.” Aziraphale stares in horror as Crowley shrugs. “A coach, Crowley.”

“Point?”

“You’ll be sat on a coach for two hours there and back, every day!”

“You- it’s- calm down, angel, you’re acting like I’ve agreed to saw my hands and feet off every morning.”

“You’ll- Crowley, you’ll be in the most terrible mood every morning. A coach will only make you even more bad tempered than usual. You know you’ll hate it, because I know for a fact that you invented the concept of long-distance coach journeys.”

Crowley hangs his head back and moans. “I don’t want to move flat, though. I like my flat.”

Aziraphale purses his lips. He’s never liked Crowley’s flat, and he’s always made that quite clear by the way he’ll huff and puff when he sits on the uncomfortable sofa, or cast judgemental glances at the decor. The only things he likes about that place are the lovely houseplants, whom he gives lots of warm encouragement when he visits. 

“You could-” Aziraphale begins. And then he realises, with horror, what he’s about to suggest. 

He’s catapulted back to that moment on the bench in Tadfield. Crowley offering him a place to stay. _I don’t think my side would like that._

But now- things haven’t changed since then, not even a bit. And it’s now that Aziraphale realises that that might be a lot to do with his own cowardice. 

“You could stay at mine. Temporarily,” he finally says. Quickly. Clears his throat. Looks at Crowley, looks at the cash register and the long queue snaking out the door- then back at Crowley, who’s staring at him, eyes unfortunately hidden. 

“Stay,” Crowley says. “With you.”

“Just for the time being. I’ve found a delightful little apartment on the High Street, quite a rare find, I believe. A nice view of the Camera and- Crowley, stop looking at me like that.”

“Like what,” he says, expression slack, looking strangely drunk.

“Like... Just stop staring,” Aziraphale argues ineffectually. “You don’t have to take up the offer if you don’t want to, it’s not as if I’m forcing you.”

Crowley gapes. “I know. Yes. Yes- I’ll stay with you. For a bit. Just till I...”

There’s a huge, cavernous pause between Crowley’s words. Aziraphale stares and feels his heartbeat fighting against his chest. Crowley swallows. 

“Just,” Crowley tries again, voice breaking. “Just till I find my feet. No big deal.”

“Of course not.”

“What’s- what’s- you know- what’s two friends sharing a flat together? Everyone does it.”

“Precisely.”

“Nothing unusual about it.”

“Quite.”

“Nothing to worry about.”

Aziraphale looks up. “Why would there be?”

“No reason- you don’t mind me, you know, lurking around. Getting in the way-”

“You couldn’t possibly.”

He can just about see Crowley’s eyes widen behind the veneer of his glasses. “You might not want me there.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“You might change your mind.”

“I would never.”

“Having people hanging about in your home can be annoying…”

“You’re not people.”

They look at each other. Their words had come so quickly to the surface, so unexpectedly. Like they’d both been speaking in streams of consciousness. Aziraphale is dizzy from it. The sincerity, the painful emergence of his feelings into the cold light of day- it’s giving him vertigo. He’s horrified. It’s as if his love for Crowley, which he’s worked so hard to bury, has simply crawled out from under its trap, wrestled its way into his mouth and jumped into existence. He hadn’t realised that those feelings had gotten free. And now they’ve been said- the damage is done. 

But Crowley doesn’t recoil. He doesn’t frown or scoff or mock; he stares, a gentle look of surprise. 

“I’ll stay, then,” he says. “I’ll. I’ll stay.”

Aziraphale nods shakily, peers into his empty teacup. “Good.” He clears his throat, manages a wobbly smile. “I’ll set up the futon, then.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> it's all about t h e h a n d s

Ceilings aren’t comfortable. 

Futons aren’t much better, which is how he ended up here. He’s not sure when he fell asleep last night- it must have been in the wee hours of the morning, because he feels like total shit. Waking up on a textured ceiling doesn’t tend to improve the mood. Crowley should know better, he’s woken up like this before. 

Peeling himself away from the white pebble-dash, he rolls onto his back. Below is Aziraphale’s living room, and a mess of cushions and sheets on the futon. There’s two wine glasses by the sink, red wine stained. An old Persian rug (it probably costs thousands, now), and cases and cases and cases of books. It’s not a big flat, and it feels a lot smaller having been crammed with a fraction of Aziraphale’s library. 

His alarm goes off. He sighs, rubs his face, walks along the ceiling and down the wall towards his phone, which is sitting on the living room coffee table. He groans loudly. 

The bedroom door opens.

“Morning- oh. I see you aren’t ready yet.”

Crowley turns and glares. It should be more effective, since he isn’t wearing his sunglasses, but Aziraphale merely potters into the kitchenette, unthreatened. He ends up death-staring the back of his head instead. 

“I’ll put the kettle on, shall I?’

“Hmmph,” Crowley grumbles. 

Aziraphale hums some tune he half recognises. The blue shirt he’s wearing is freshly ironed; tucked into a perfect pair of cream corduroys; the green cardigan unbuttoned; the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. 

The sleeves are rolled up.

Crowley hovers by the coffee table, holding his phone. He watches Aziraphale fill the kettle at the sink. And whilst he has lived through several millennia with Aziraphale and seen him in a variety of outfits, from pantaloons to togas, he’s never seen him roll up his shirt sleeves. He’s never seen him in _green_ before. There’s something so unusual, so surprising, so uncharacteristic about it- almost experimental- that it is also incredibly, bizarrely, attractive.

He’d stumbled and faltered when he saw Aziraphale’s outfit yesterday for the first time. One would have thought he’d be over it by now. It’s only a green bloody-well cardigan. 

“Sleeves,” Crowley says stupidly. 

Because he may be capable of some fairly sophisticated thought, but his mouth is a moron. 

Aziraphale is dropping teabags into two mugs as he turns and looks over his shoulder. “Pardon?”

Crowley clears his throat, scratches his bedhead. “Sleeves are rolled up. Better, er. Roll them down. For, for- _professionalism._ Isn’t it? More professional.”

Aziraphale stares for a moment, then looks at his arms. His forearms, which are bare, and which Crowley finds suddenly fascinating. And then, he rolls down his sleeves. “Oh, yes, I suppose it is.”

Crowley is grateful. 

“Did you sleep alright?” Aziraphale asks too lightly.

“Yep. Like a baby. Slept for hours, good futon.”

“Oh, no, oh, Lord, Crowley, I’m _so_ sorry,” Aziraphale suddenly cries, turning around and pressing his hands to his cheeks, “it’s horrible to sleep on, isn’t it?”

“Wh-?”

“I can tell you’re lying- you may be a demon and awfully skilled at it, but I’ve always been able to tell.”

Well, that’s a terrifying thing to discover, Crowley thinks. 

“It’s fine, your ceiling is perfectly serviceable,” he replies as coolly as he can. 

He watches Aziraphale’s shoulders rise and fall with a sigh, watches him pour tea into the mugs. The steam billows, coming up in a cloud and flowing around the kitchen cabinets. An image of Aziraphale getting ready for work; preparing a cup of tea for them both; talking so easily in a home that they’re (temporarily) sharing. Crowley sits on the arm of the sofa and watches, hurting. 

“Well,” Aziraphale eventually announces, dropping a dash of milk into each mug. “Next time I offer you my bed, you should accept it.”

“I’m not chucking you out of your own damn bed, Aziraphale,” Crowley snarls, harsher than he’d meant it to sound.

But of course, Aziraphale pays no mind. He’s always known the bark from the bite, and so he turns round and hands a mug to Crowley, handle towards him. Crowley takes the handle without needing to burn his hands. Aziraphale’s are red when he takes his fingers away from the mug. 

“We can swap around.”

“I’m _fine._ ”

Aziraphale looks at him. Crowley never knows what to do when he does that. Then, with a glance to the Heavens, Aziraphale replies, “Alright, see if I care.”

There’s humour in the tone, and Crowley snorts in response. 

With a miracle snap of his fingers, Crowley dresses in the same conjured outfit he wore yesterday. Boots and high-waisted pin-striped trousers. The billowing white shirt and suspenders. He wore this once in the 80s and some twat told him he looked like a Victorian dandy as an insult- as if that wasn’t precisely the aesthetic he was aiming for. 

“So, what’s on the agenda, professor,” Crowley says with as much swaggers as he can muster. 

It creates the desired effect. Aziraphale preens a little bashfully, casts him those sidelong glances that Crowley would absolutely kill for. Coy little looks that drive him absolutely fucking insane with affection and softness and all sorts of horrible feelings. 

He’s probably smiling gently at Aziraphale right now, or something equally horrific and love-sick.

“I thought we’d kick off the term with some Ovid,” Aziraphale replies, taking a seat on the sofa beside where Crowley’s perched on the arm. He holds the mug daintily in his cupped hands. 

“Ovid. He was a character, eh.”

Aziraphale widens his eyes in agreement. “Oh, yes. Quite the, erm… provocateur. What about you? When’s your first lecture?”

“I have to teach third years this morning. I’d… sort of forgotten that I’d have to teach other classes.”

“So had I,” Aziraphale admits. “Adam is in my first class, though.”

“I have him in the afternoon. Thought we’d do some Lucretius.”

He earns an eye-roll. “Blasphemous as ever.”

“What? He says some interesting ideas about the creation myth. And he actually wasn’t that far off on how the universe was created. It’s philosophy, it’s meant to be at least a little bit blasphemous. If you’re not blaspheming here, and questioning the point of life there, then you’re not philosophising properly. Philosophising- that is a word, isn’t it?”

Aziraphale gives him a long look. “Yes.”

Crowley stares at his tea. “This is going to be fucking awful.”

Neither one of them deny it. They look at each other, and share a quiet, knowing laugh. 

Crowley almost immediately asks himself what he’s doing with his life. 

As it turns out, teaching philosophy to final year undergraduates at Oxford University isn’t easy. It’s certainly fun, though. There had been some bafflement when their Greek and Roman Philosophy expert announced he had met Socrates in person. 

At the beginning of the lesson, Crowley had sauntered in. There were only six students attending the lecture, which was therefore held in his office (a concept that’s still a bit foreign and terrifying to him). Admittedly, appearing in his own office five minutes late wasn’t the best start. But then, he’d broken into an accidental, angry tirade about how difficult Socrates made _any_ kind of social interaction other than in the format of a debate. By the time he’d been ranting about it for five minutes, the students seemed to find it sort of amusing, and maybe even liked him for bonkers he was. 

Crowley leans against his desk in his now empty study. He looks at the schedule of Classics lectures at Corpus Christi, and eventually figures out Adam’s specific timetable. He should be with Aziraphale now. 

Standing up properly and stretching, he takes a moment to look around the room. This room which is his _office_ now.

What do people even _do_ in offices?

It can’t just be a library. Naturally, the shelves are filled with books. And the desk is huge and mahogany, with a nice new computer on it. And there’s a cabinet of awards and certificates that he’d sort of conjured on the spot to fill it up and look fancy. But what do people actually _do_ in here? Nobody’s- Christ, nobody’s expecting him to mark things, are they?

Snorting to himself, Crowley leaves, locks the door behind him with a snap of his fingers. Such flagrant miracling is probably stupid, but he has proven himself over the past six milennia to be very stupid indeed, and has found there’s no point in pretending to himself that he isn’t. The parquet floor echoes under his boots as he makes his way down the corridor. 

Some heads turn. He doesn’t look like your typical old, musty professor, to be sure. Some professors slow down to view him- look as if they want to ask him how he’s settling in, what classes he’s had so far- but quickly speed up when they note the intense _do not fucking talk to me_ vibes he’s giving off. Arms swinging, he aims for what he thinks might be the direction of Aziraphale’s lecture room. 

He notices the sound of his voice as soon as he turns the corner. 

It’s that gentle, happy tone of Aziraphale’s that floats through the air. His words as light as the dust that’s catching the winter light, pouring through the huge, Tudor windows. Crowley looks down the corridor through the veil of sunny haze. And he walks slowly, towards the sound of Aziraphale’s voice. 

“...And of course, whilst Ovid regrets writing his poetry- as _carmen et error_ would suggest- his predecessor Horace viewed it as the thing that made him immortal. Establishing immortality through literature is no new concept…”

As Crowley suspected. Aziraphale is absolutely in his element. Whilst he has never quite known what to do with children, and therefore would have made a terrible teacher, a university lecturer seems to be practically what he was built to do. To have someone to ramble on about his interests to- someone who isn’t Crowley, at least. He must get bored of talking to Crowley.

He stands outside the doorway, out of sight. For a moment, he simply listens; listens and looks out of the windows, almost too bright to see. Through the light the courtyard shines below, students coming and going outside. 

“... which is typified in _exegi monumentum_. Now, perhaps Ovid was more of a rebel than dear old Horace- Augustus certainly saw him fit for exile. And whilst Catullus wrote sordidly, it was nonetheless largely about his own personal life, whereas Ovid…”

People walk in front of him, but he doesn’t see. Aziraphale’s enthusiasm sinks into him, and he lowers himself into it as if in a warm bath. The soft bounce to Aziraphale’s voice; the slight hesitation, as if worried someone will stop him whilst he’s on a roll. Crowley chews his lip. He leans against the wall, palms flat against the wood panelling, and listens. Worries his lip a bit more. Then, with a resigned sigh, he turns to peer around the door frame. 

The door is left ajar, so he can see most of the class. Bigger than his this morning, around twenty students. He spots Adam near the back, taking notes. He’s grown a lot since he last saw him. It still takes Crowley by surprise, seeing how humans change. 

He can’t see Aziraphale at first, but then, he steps into sight. Pen in his hand, writing illegible notes on the board. His cardigan unbuttoned, and a look of nervousness in his eye, even as he speaks with such joy. His gaze flitting from student to student quickly, too quickly to not be self-conscious. It’s warm in here, the heating turned on full, and there’s a small flush to his cheeks. Flecks of black ink on his fingers, from the board-pen. A smile on his face. A real one, even if Crowley spots the wariness in it.

And he watches. Just for a while longer. He watches from outside the lecture room, and for a moment, he feels as if he is a snake again- peering through the trees and shrubbery, gazing at an angel he doesn’t know on the wall up above. 

Two hours later, Crowley kicks open the door of a lecture theatre. 

The room hushes, a few people’s voices lingering as they mutter to each other. This theatre is significantly bigger than his office. And there are around forty people in here with their Macbooks out. 

Crowley barely looks at them, sidles up to the desk up front. He throws his head back and downs the coffee that he’d accidentally left to cool in the staffroom. There’s no pauses for breath; he pours it down his throat without hesitation, and the students simply wait in stunned silence. His audience stares as he tips his head back further to get the last drop. 

He slams the mug onto the desk. A few people jump. 

“Ugh. _Ugh_. Why do humans drink coffee again? Anyway, right-”

There’s some nervous laughter. Crowley measures the objects on his desk; a computer; a laser-pointer; lined paper. Crowley picks up the laser pointer between thumb and finger.

“‘S this on? How- ah- there we _go_.”

Crowley fiddles with it, figures it out, and begins spinning the little red light in circles on the opposite wall. Adam is on the front row, grinning from ear to ear. 

“Anyway, enough of that-” Crowley throws the laser-pointer onto the desk again. The batteries fall out on impact. “Philosophy. Philosophy, philosophy, philosophy. _PHILOSOPHY._ ”

A few more people jump at that last, sudden announcement. The others laugh properly now. 

“Phil-o-so-phy-yuh. What’s philosophy, then?”

Crowley finally gives his audience a proper look. Yes, there’s Adam, sat next to- is that one of the kids that he hung out with that day? Surely not. It certainly looks like it, but he can’t be sure. Anyway, the front row all look fairly spoddy apart from Adam. The second row are making their way through Starbucks drinks and tapping away on Apple products, and the back two rows all seem to be wearing sports kits. Girls in yoga lycra and boys in rugby gear. He’s looking at them, a room of eighteen and nineteen year olds trying to learn Ancient Philosophy, and they’re looking at him- a manic, androgynous red-head in a frilly shirt. 

“Well?” he prompts. The students blink at each other. “Come on, then, what’s philosophy mean? What is it?”

“The study of…”

“What?”

A rugby lad near the front frowns at him. Then he looks about the room with a smirk, trying to find people to join him in judging Crowley. “Er, like, the study of the universe and the meaning of the universe?”

“Nah.”

Everyone stares. Side-glances are shared. 

“Well, go on then, try again.”

A girl at the front raises her hand. 

“Don’t- don’t raise your hand, God, no. It’s weird.”

She brings it down quickly and sits up straight in her seat. “Understanding who we are, and how we fit into the universe?”

He walks around the desk, leans against it, folds his arms in front of him. Pretends to think. “No. Next.” 

“Asking the big questions?”

“Oh, now that’s a bit closer,” Crowley replies. “But no.”

Everyone goes quiet. 

He rolls his head back impatiently. “Haven’t any of you thought about this properly? Thought this was where all the _great minds_ were,” he adds mockingly.

“That’s…” the rugby lad begins to argue. He falters a little under Crowley’s glare. Sunglasses or not, he intimidates.

“Think of it this way.” Crowley pushes himself off the desk, fetches a board pen, draws an unnaturally perfect circle. In the middle, he writes _knowledge._ “What would you do to access this?” he asks, poking the whiteboard. 

The students look at each other. 

“I can give you the answer right now,” he continues, brows raised expectantly. Still no answer. “£9,250 per year of debt is how much you’d give for this, thanks to tuition fees.”

A low rumble of chuckles, and perhaps a few groans too. 

“And you made that choice, even if it was hard, because you weighed up your options and you thought, ‘yeah, go on, then, I’ll go to Oxford.”

“There’s a lot more than that to weigh up, though,” rugby lad chips in. “I mean, you have to get the grades, you have to live with the fact you’ll have student loan debt, and a degree helps you get jobs, so…”

“Oh, yeah, it’s by no means easy. Let’s up the stakes though. Let’s say you get to have all this, and more- knowledge beyond what you could comprehend- which is sort of, I guess, how it works- let’s say you get this,” he smacks the board again, “lots of knowledge, suddenly pinging into your head, for better or worse, but the risks are: you burden your darling children and their children and so on with the heavy weight of that knowledge, so they have to pay the price as well as you.”

“You’re alluding to Eden,” the rugby lad says.

Adam sinks in his chair and hides his face behind his hand. Oh, good. He’s embarrassed. 

“Yes, I am _alluding to Eden_ , well spotted,” he says with a curled lip. “So? Would you?”

“No,” one girl at the front says. “I wouldn’t. I mean, there’s a reason you get all these dystopian novels about the impossible quest for knowledge. And if the garden of Eden really happened- well, it hasn’t exactly worked out well for us.”

“Hasn’t it?” Crowley asks.

She blinks at him, looks away self-consciously. 

“I would,” rugby lad says. “I think it’s reductionist to say it hasn’t worked for us. Knowledge is what makes us human.”

“Is it?” Crowley asks. 

The room goes quiet. He can hear the cogs whirring. Some people are staring at their computers so they don’t get questioned by him. Most of them are frowning, thinking. Some are smiling at the challenge. Because, despite what Hollywood portrays in the movies, lectures at university aren’t usually as confrontational as this. 

“Anybody else?” Crowley asks, sounding a bit bored. He sighs. “Fine-”

“It’s about choice.”

Adam is doodling on his notepad, not looking at Crowley. Everyone, though, is looking at Adam. “Philosophy, humanity, whatever- it’s about choice. You make the choice about what you believe in; what you think is right, what you should do, what or who’s important to you. That little moment where time stops and you need to make a decision and decide how you make it. That’s what I think, anyway.”

Crowley finds himself smiling. He rearranges his face- it’s a bad habit to get into. “And it’s not just humans. No, humans aren’t that special, animals make choices, too. Should I run away from that predator or should I hide? What’s different with animals, though, is that they don’t make choices about what they can _know._ They chose survival, not knowledge.”

“But knowledge can save you, too,” rugby lad adds.

“Most of the time it kills you,” Crowley replies quickly. “It damns you. As it were. ‘Blissfully ignorant’, and all that. Humans chose that risk. And…” he considers his next word for a moment. “...If God is real, if angels and demons are real, then that’s their risk, too. Lucifer paid the price of his choices. Just as humanity did.”

Crowley allows this to sink in. Adam looks up at Crowely, clicking his pen on and off. And it strikes Crowley how much he’s grown; he has stubble, now. Weird. 

The boy on Adam’s other side puts his hand up. He recognises this one. That’s one of the kids from back in the day, that Adam hung out with. Glasses and pursed lips and like he’s been hand-reared for accountancy. 

Crowley sighs. “Yes, go on.”

“Sorry, but, isn’t there _actually_ a branch of philosophy that dictates that we have no choice and no free will at all?”

“Stoicism,” Crowley replies. “Determinism.”

“Yes. So how can philosophy be about making choices when there’s a whole type of philosophy that says-”

“The idea that there’s some force out there that dictates our every choice, that says that every decision we make is predestined by some higher, omnipotent being.”

“Well… yes. Doesn’t that actually contradict-?”

“All of it contradicts, though, that’s why it’s a choice still,” Adam argues, looking at his friend. “All the branches of philosophy are different opinions, different choices.”

“Also, like, you do still choose to do things,” rugby lad says. “It can’t be all planned exactly.”

“Who says it can’t?”

Everyone looks back at Crowley.

“Who says there isn’t some big…” He can’t believe he’s saying it. “... _Ineffable plan_.”

Adam chokes on a snort. 

“If you want my opinion- not that I care because I’m giving it anyway- Determinism is bollocks. Even if everything is planned, all it takes is a couple of raging morons to ruin that plan. Maybe the apple was put there because God, or fate, or destiny wanted humans to take it. Otherwise it would’ve been, I don’t know, put on the moon or something. Maybe God simply wanted to see them make the choice. Maybe God planned all the shit that happened a few years ago with the Kraken, right? But it doesn’t take long for us to ruin things. And I’ll tell you this, God certainly doesn’t give a shit about the little decisions you make throughout the day. She doesn’t give a fuck whether or not you buy caffeinated or decaf tea. In short, Fuck Determinism. Heaven might be a fan of it, but us lot in Hell prefer Epicureanism.”

That gets a few laughs. Oh, if only they knew. 

At the end of the lecture, Crowley wipes off his notes from the board. 

“Crowley?”

Adam’s wearing a sardonic smile. Shirt buttoned all the way to the top, messy, floppy hair. Ink all over his hands. Every bit the student, and still every bit Adam. 

“That’s professor Crowley to you,” he replies with a trademark smug smile. He curtseys. “Lord, son of Satan.”

“Come off it,” Adam laughs, giving Crowley a shove. 

“How you enjoying the hotbed of sin that’s university, then? Made any life-altering mistakes, yet? Thought about bringing the world to an end?”

“No, just the food in my university college. Literally all they serve is chips every meal, it’s rank.” He pauses, looks at Crowley. “No offence, but what are you doing here?”

Crowley leans against the whiteboard, arms folded in front of him. “What? You know we were coming, didn’t you?”

“You’re going to get red pen on your shirt.”

Crowley jumps away from the board. “Fuck’s sake-”

“And yeah, I knew you were coming to visit, I didn’t know you were going to be my philosophy lecturer.”

Adam gives him that slightly judgemental, _very_ unsettling stare that he’s had since he was a boy. Crowley clears his throat. 

“Oh. Must have… must have slipped my mind- anyway, we’re just, we’re just here to keep any eye on you. Pretend we’re not here.”

Adam still stares. “Why, though?”

“Ah. Your father-”

“My shitty-Hell father?”

“Yes, your shitty-Hell father, Lucifer, has decided he’s suddenly interested in you.”

“What does he want with me now?”

“Probably something to do with you being eighteen and making poor life choices. I wasn’t joking about the hotbed of sin.”

“What, does he think I’m just gonna like- get drunk and cause the apocalypse?”

“I think that’s exactly what he thinks you’ll do.”

Adam snorts. “Right. Nice try, shithead.”

“That’s my boy.”

They share a toothy grin. Then, Adam frowns. “Won’t you get into trouble for this? Being here?”

“Me? Nah. Your shitty-Hell father- I like that, gonna use that- he, er, gave up on me after he found out I cocked up the Armageddon plans. Which suits me just fine. Between you and me, I think they’re all a bit too scared to tell me off now.

“Scared?” Adam scoffs. “You wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

“Oi. Don’t go telling people that.”

Adam smiles. It quickly fades, and he looks at the floor, takes a long, deep breath. “Hotbed of sin. Yeah. I can feel it.”

The sound of pupils in the corridor echoes, drifts into the empty lecture theatre. 

“I can feel it around me. It’s… like a magnetic field. It’s like the auras that Anathema tells me about. I can feel the hairs on my arms stand up sometimes.” Adam stares, wide-eyed. Crowley’s mouth goes a little dry. Then: “But it’s fine, really, no different from secondary school to be honest.”

Crowley laughs mirthlessly. “Aha. Right. Of course.”

“Anyway, catch you later, I’m going to this new vegan place with The Them.”

“You still hang out with that lot, then?”

Adam walks backwards as he talks to Crowley, notepad clutched to his chest. “Yeah, Pepper’s training to be a nurse at Oxford Brookes, me and Wensleydale are here, and Brian’s taking a gap year working at his dad’s shop to make some money. He comes into Oxford on his days off, which is cool. Anyway, see you later.”

And then he’s gone, as if he isn’t Hell spawn at all. Which, Crowley thinks, he isn’t, really. Not anymore, not ever. 

Ten minutes later, he’s back in his office with a newly-conjured degree certificate- he thought it might be more impressive to have a joint honours in Philosophy _and_ Maths- when there’s a knock at the door.

Crowley tries to ignore the mounting anxiety as he tries to straighten the frame, can’t stop fiddling with it no matter how straight it appears. He sighs. “Yep.”

He hears the door open. He steps back and looks at the frame. It’s not right. He doesn’t know why, but it’s not right, and as ever that brings a large dose of pointless anxiety. He sighs again, a little more angrily this time, and moves to fiddle with it again. “This fucking frame-”

“What a lovely office you have, Crowley.”

He turns around quickly. Aziraphale stands in the doorway, that watery winter light picking up the strange silver-gold of his hair. His hands are loosely clasped, his eyes scanning the dark mahogany of his office. He looks bright in here, just as he looks bright back in his bookshop. 

“Angel,” he greets him quietly. He turns to look at him, leans against his desk, wonky frame- amazingly- forgotten. “How was it then?”

-He asks, as if he hadn’t watched ten minutes of Aziraphale’s lecture.

“It was fine, thank you. Strange.” Aziraphale nods, finding this answer unsatisfactory, judging by the pinch in his brow. “Yes, it went well I think. And you?”

“Ah, yeah, fine, fine. Spoke to Adam, and he seemed…”

He looks at Aziraphale and Aziraphale looks back. 

“Well,” the angel jumps in to help, “he seemed quite himself to me.”

“Yes, exactly, bloody Hell,” Crowley sags against the desk. “I hate to say this but I think we might’ve jumped the gun a bit. False alarm. Came all this way for nothing.”

“That isn’t a bad thing, dear.”

“No, obviously not, although it is a bit irritating, isn’t it- after the, the panic and the fuss they’re making downstairs- and upstairs, by the sound of it.”

“Yes. Considering all that, we may as well… stick around.”

“And here’s you and me, running over to Oxford in our best professor disguises, when Adam’s doing perfectly fine and- sorry, what?”

“There’s no harm in just making sure he really is as well as he says he is,” Aziraphale replies easily, perhaps too casually. He peers out into the corridor, then closes the door behind him. “It does seem that there’s very little risk of him triggering Armageddon again, I agree. Which, might I remind you, is a relief.”

“Yes, yes, obviously, I know.”

“But, I don’t think there would be any reason to _leave_ , not just yet. And, of course… you could still stay at mine.”

Crowley watches the way Aziraphale avoids his gaze. Hands still gently clasped in front of him. 

“Until when,” Crowley asks.

“Until we feel content with the fact that Adam has properly settled in. We can be there for him in times of instability and uncertainty. You know… really, truly be his Godfathers.”

They both think of the implications. Living here in Oxford, lecturing, keeping up appearances to make sure Adam is safe. Not so different to the nanny-gardener spiel, and yet this time, somehow, it is very different. 

He gives in. “Think of what would happen if any of your lot or my lot swung by and tried to influence Adam themselves.” 

Aziraphale’s whole demeanor lifts. “Yes, yes, exactly! It’s only sensible to stay.”

“Although, they’re not really ‘your lot and my lot’ at all, anymore, are they.”

He doesn’t reply, simply looks at Crowley and waits. There have been many conversations like this before; Aziraphale making his argument, Crowley pretending he disagrees, Aziraphale waiting for him to come round to his side. 

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Crowley mutters. “You’ve convinced me.”

Aziraphale smiles brightly. It’s one of those smiles that makes Crowley wonder how many other similar smiles he’s missed out on. 

“How about a walk,” he suggests, surprising himself. 

Aziraphale softens. “A walk? Where? We could stroll around the botanical gardens-”

“Nah. My car’s parked across the road- I have somewhere else in mind.”

Fortunately, both of their timetables are free. Not that either of them checked; they’ve never adhered to any sort of schedule in their entire lives. 

Crowley opens the car door for Aziraphale, which he accepts with a bashful smile. They wind through the Oxford traffic, breaking as many laws as Crowley usually breaks when he drives, and almost running over several tourists. Before long, they’re out of the city centre, through Botley, out of Oxford entirely, and in the Cotswolds.

The hills roll. The grass glistens in dew, the early morning’s rain. A ‘Best of Queen’ CD plays. Old habits die hard. And all the while, Crowley drives with one hand on the wheel, leaning in that nonchalant way that he only does when Aziraphale’s there to get stressed about it. _Hands on the wheel, Crowley, good Lord!_ At the moment, though, Aziraphale hums to the music with the smallest of smiles- a barely there smile that somehow breaks Crowley’s heart all the more, because it seems so natural. 

They drive through the hills, through the tiny villages with forgettable names and unforgettable views. The car steams up a little, and Aziraphale wipes his window to see it all. 

“Where are you taking me?” Aziraphale asks dreamily. 

_Anywhere you’d like_ , he thinks. He can’t think why that’s the first thing that comes to mind; possibly because he’s said it before. That part of him that’s jumping to do something, anything for Aziraphale no matter the consequences. Luckily, in this case, the worst consequences that they will probably face is that they get rained on. 

“Little pub, just a bit further on from here,” he says instead. Drums his fingers against the wheel. “Could go for a walk first.”

Aziraphale looks at him. His expression is gentle, as if he’s just woken up. “Lunch and a walk?”

“Yeah.”

“Perhaps-”

Aziraphale hesitates. And Crowley suddenly realises that they’re speaking about their afternoon plans as if there’s some hidden meaning to it all. As if ‘lunch and a walk’ means something else entirely, as if this symbolises something more than a simple stroll. Of course, to Crowley, it does; everything that he does with Aziraphale means more than the angel will ever see. But the way he looks at him now, the ever-so-slight strain in his voice, the lightness of it, like a bead of water ready to break its surface tension-

Why can’t they ever just say things aloud?

“Perhaps,” Aziraphale manages a little breathlessly, “we could make it a picnic.”

Crowley bites the inside of his lip. Why is he suddenly incredibly aware of his tongue? Why is he suddenly incredibly, uncomfortably aware of his corporeal body? “Dunno if we can get food to go. But-”

“We could sit outside. On one of those little benches. You know.”

“I do,” Crowley concedes.

They both look through the windscreen. The sky has brightened since this morning. 

“It’s not quite The Ritz,” Crowley begins.

“No. It’s far better.”

Now Crowley looks at Aziraphale. His hands clasped, thumbs warring with each other nervously, a smile on his face. He doesn’t even look at him when he says, “Eyes on the road, Crowley.”

His response gets stuck in his throat as he returns his attention to the tiny country road and the cyclist wobbling in front of him. None of that hitting a cyclist nonsense again, no thank you. 

They drive past Tadfield. The pub is about a quarter of a mile from here, so Crowley finds a viewpoint and parks. There’s a stile and a little foot-carved path beyond the bonnet of the car. And beyond that, hills and sunshine picking up the dew. In the distance, a village, nestled beside a river. Crowley can see the chimneys and water-wheels that show it’s history of industry. Now, it’s sleepy, quiet.

Crowley puts on the handbrake, turns off the car, and sits for a moment. Aziraphale doesn’t move immediately either. 

“My word,” he whispers. “Crowley, I’m glad we saved the world. Even if just for these small moments.”

He turns to see Aziraphale, who turns away like he hadn’t been looking at the view at all. He-

“Right-ho, let’s amble on, shall we?”

Aziraphale dives out of the car, and there’s the sound of his shoes on the wet gravel. Crowley snorts, steps out of the car himself. 

“There’s a path just there we can take, if you-”

“Jolly good.”

Aziraphale bipasses the stile, opting for the more dignified gate option, and powers down the path. Crowley is left standing in wonder, watching him disappear into the Cotswolds. He jogs to catch up.

After a confusingly flighty start to the walk, they head down to the village, where they pass a small post office, the ruined remains of the water mill, a little tearoom. That would be for next time, they agree. They cross a dainty bridge- stopping to play pooh-sticks- and enter a forest, brown trodden leaves and red ones falling from above. They walk and talk. They can’t do anything without talking, and Crowley wouldn’t have it any other way. 

They climb the hill back up and sit on a bench. The wind whistles through his ears and Aziraphale sits close to him. 

Crowley rests an arm along the back of the bench behind Aziraphale. Aziraphale shuffles a little closer. 

They find lunch at the pub, and his sunglasses steam up as soon as he steps inside. They end up sitting in front of the fire eating sandwiches and chips, instead of risking the rain outside. The meal lasts longer than it needs to, neither one of them willing to leave. They talk about things that they’ve talked about before, just to make it last longer.

And eventually, when the winter sun decides to come down (the bastard), they deem it sensible to return to Oxford. And when they return to Oxford, Aziraphale suggests a walk through Christchurch Meadows. 

Crowley agrees. 

And so they walk through the gardens and find another bench, covered in wet leaves, looking over the river. People are punting, even at this time of year and in this weather. Students pass by with backpacks and satchel bags. Dog walkers pass by them, students gossip, runners run. They watch it all like a movie. Aziraphale’s cheeks are pink in the cold, and Crowley keeps his hands in his pockets.

Crowley looks up at the sky. He points.

“There’s mine,” he mutters, after an unusual stretch of silence. 

Aziraphale looks up. The lamplights aren’t bright enough to dim the stars. Christchurch college sits in the distance, beneath the tapestry of the universe. And Aziraphale, wrapped in a cardigan, scarf and duffle coat, tips his head up to look at Crowley’s creation. 

“Orion’s belt?”

“Just the last one, the one on the right,” he says. “Someone else made the first two- can’t remember who- and I just, couldn’t deal with it not having a third. Needed a third star to really make it, don’t you think?”

“Oh, absolutely,” Aziraphale says in a low, appreciative voice, a little bit of mischief in there too. “Orion would be _naked_ otherwise.”

“Which, I suppose, wouldn’t have been such a problem if I hadn’t tempted Eve and made nakedness all squicky.” 

“Very inconvenient of you to have done so.”

Crowley drops his arm, leans back a little to give Aziraphale a surprised eyebrow-raise. He needs to lean back, with how close they’re sitting. 

Aziraphale shrugs with a proud little smile. “Just an observation.”

They look at the University college in the distance, hidden by trees and light up by orange lamplights. He tastes winter in the air. He tastes the memory of Aziraphale’s treacle sponge, which he’d urged Crowley to try a bite of. And he feels the cold, the type of cold that makes him feel paradoxically warm under his skin and in his chest. 

He likes paradoxes, though. Him and Aziraphale, they’re a paradox. He lives off paradoxes. 

“You didn’t tell me how your lecture went,” Aziraphale asks. 

Crowley suddenly finds a flask being passed to him- a little screw-on lid acting as a cup, filled to the brim with steaming tea. He shakes his head, unsurprised but pleased, and takes it. 

“It was fine. You get into the swing of it, I guess, don’t you?”

“I think so. I felt a little on the spot at first, and I don’t particularly like performing for an audience.” Crowley snorts. Aziraphale elbows him, continues. “But I enjoyed it, in the end. I suppose I’ll enjoy it less when I have to teach irritating people.”

“Could just miracle them off your register of students.”

“Yes, I’ll probably do that. You can’t just will them out of your classroom if they’re expected to be there- it’s not quite like the bookshop. What did you end up teaching Adam’s class?”

“Well, Lucretius was the plan, but we side-tracked towards Epicurus.” 

Aziraphale nods. Crowley laughs with a sudden memory. 

“What?”

“I used Eden. As an example.”

Aziraphale stares, angles himself a little towards Crowley. “Really?”

“Yep. And, it doesn’t stop there either-”

“ _Crowley._ ”

“Drew a rude picture of the Archangel Michael.”

Aziraphale’s face contorts in repressed amusement. “I beg your pardon?”

“On the whiteboard. I drew a rude picture of the Archangel Michael, fighting Lucifer. Lucifer didn’t come out so great, either, my art skills are pants.”

He tries to hide his laugh behind his hand when he says, “Crowley. Think of the trouble you could get into-”

“It’s _fine_ ," he waves dismissively. "Everyone seemed to think it illustrated the battle between proverbial Good and Evil quite well.”

Aziraphale’s eyes shine. And then he dissolves, the laughter pouring out. Hand falling away from his mouth, smile wide. A real laugh, bright and light, the Italian meringue of laughs. And it’s heavenly- truly heavenly, not how Heaven is now. And Crowley smiles when he watches. He feels himself fracture with how lovely this moment is. 

The laughter dwindles, and they sit side by side. It’s as it’s always been; but now Crowley feels it shift. He feels them tip towards the unknown, as if this bench is tilting them into something…

Fucking Hell, fine. Towards something ineffable. 

“Let’s go home,” Aziraphale whispers. 

The disappointment is familiar. It’s almost comforting. They’ve relied on things staying this way for so long. “Alright, home. I’ll drop you off.”

Aziraphale looks at him, a little surprised and hurt. Then Crowley remembers.

“Oh. If- unless, you’re- if- yeah. I mean. Probably, shouldn’t have assumed, though, right?”

“That’s very good of you,” Aziraphale whispers. Purses his lips as he summons the words he wants. “But you really can, Crowley. Our… our own side. That’s what you said.”

“And I stand by it.”

“Well then,” Aziraphale whispers. “I wasn’t ready then. I am, now.”

They sit together for a moment longer before walking through the Meadows. They head home, drink more tea. They say their goodbyes in the warmth of Aziraphale’s apartment, side-lamps bringing a low light to the rooms- the night bringing a fragility, an elusiveness to the day that has passed. 

Crowley feels Aziraphale’s hand on his arm when he says goodnight. It slides down towards his elbow, lingers there. Or maybe it doesn’t; but the feeling lingers there, and Crowley tries to keep it for as long as possible.


	3. Chapter 3

**Saturday morning, six days after Crowley and Aziraphale’s arrival in Oxford.**

He wakes up feeling like concrete has set in his stomach. 

With a groan, Aziraphale rolls onto his back, and everything moves. His mouth is dry and he has absolutely no concept of how he got to bed last night. The realisation floods him with panic, before he remembers-

 _Ah. This is what happens when you forget to sober up, Aziraphale,_ he thinks to himself.

He lies there for a second longer, just until the ceiling has settled down again. And then he decides he’d rather sleep the hangover off than go through the (frankly very energy consuming) effort of sobering up. So he closes his eyes.

“Eurgh. Christ on a fucking bike…”

And, well. _That_ makes him jolt upright. 

“ _Crowley?_ ”

Propping himself up on his elbows, Crowley grimaces, eyes closed- still not prepared to face the light of day, it seems. His hair has been shaped flat on one side, and the other is voluminous and rats’ nestish. Lipstick smudged across his cheek, and by proxy, on Aziraphale’s pillow. 

Crowley cracks open a wincing, yellow eye. 

“Oh, God,” he slurs, hardly saying words at all. Too much effort. He slides his hands in front of his face with every: “Oh God, oh God, oh God oh God ohGodohGodoh _God_.”

“I remember. Absolutely. _Nothing_ of last night,” Aziraphale enunciates slowly. A desperate hand clutches his head. “Why didn’t we sobre up?”

“Too drunk,” Crowley complains behind his hands. “Too much alcohol. Too much stupid.”

They sit in nauseous silence, staring at nothing. Then, Crowley looks at him. 

“Angel. We didn’t… I mean, we didn’t…?” 

Crowley makes vague hand gestures, wincing. Aziraphale’s nerves ignite. If anxiety were a chemical element thrown into a fire, it wouldn’t put on a nice, colourful display- it’d explode. 

“No. No! I’m certain we didn’t. Erm…” 

Aziraphale looks between the two of them. He’s still in last night’s clothes (mostly. His trousers seem to have walked off somewhere) and Crowley at least looks like he’s wearing his pyjamas. Yes, the phenomena of Crowley’s surprisingly sensible, matching, two-piece pyjamas. Aziraphale has barely stopped thinking about them this week. 

“We’re still wearing clothes. I don’t know a lot about how- it- that- _you know_ works, but I think clothes _off_ is required. For it to work.”

Crowley blinks at Aziraphale. Dares to sneak a peek under the sheets. His head hits the cushion in relief. “Yep, clothes… good. Thank fuck for that.”

“That would have been…”

They look at each other. Apparently, neither one knows what it would have been. And the realisation of that stretches into an awkward silence.

Aziraphale takes the cue to try to get out of bed. It makes his brain tip, and he holds the bedside table for support. “Tea.”

“Coffee.”

“Something to eat…”

“Noooo.”

“ _I_ need something to eat,” Aziraphale groans.

He manages to step out of bed. Remembering immediately that he’s not wearing trousers, just pants, he sees two scenarios in his head. Either he flaps about in panic and runs out of the room, making a fuss. Or, he pretends that he hadn’t forgotten, and simply walks out of the bedroom without a care in the world. Which might even look a little bit sexy. 

Somehow, in his attempt to take the latter option, he affects both. He forces himself to walk out as casually as possible, but does so with his arms plastered to his sides and his back as straight as a pole. It probably looks the very opposite of casual, and it makes Aziraphale kick himself internally. 

When he opens the door to the living room-

“Oh, bloody Hell,” he complains. 

There’s wine glasses. A lot of them, everywhere. He’s fairly sure they didn’t have guests, which can only mean that they were so drunk, they kept forgetting where they put their last glass and kept picking out new ones. There’s several outfit choices slung across the room that Crowley had conjured and Aziraphale had rejected. And there’s a baking tray with crumbs, which probably meant they got back at some God-awful time and made some burnt garlic bread. 

Because apparently, they’d had the presence of mind to make sobering-up food, but not enough to actually perform a sobering-up miracle. 

Aziraphale steps gingerly over a pair of white jeans (he remembers that. “I have standards, Crowley!” he’d argued, when he’d had those thrust at him) and puts on the kettle. He finds some brioche in the cupboard and warms it up with a little click of his fingers. The idea unsettles his stomach, but he knows he’ll feel better for eating. 

Performing a small balancing act, he puts the plate on his bent elbow and carries the mugs. 

Then he sees something. On his hand. 

“Crowley? Crowley, what is this?”

He hands the coffee to him, puts down his breakfast, and shows Crowley the back of his hand. 

Gold eyes widen. “Pfft- oh my- I can’t believe this.”

“What?”

“Six thousand years! Six thousand years I have tried to convince you, and- last night? It finally happened? Finally!”

Aziraphale stands by the bed, arms folded across his chest, probably not looking very authoritative in his pants. “ _Crowley_.”

“A club, angel. That’s a stamp from a club- we went to a nightclub last night, clearly. Oh my God-”

Crowley dissolves. He sinks into the bed, shaking with silent laughter, until all that Aziraphale can see above the duvet is a tuft of tangled red hair. 

“We went clubbing,” Aziraphale says with some resignation, power-pose sagging. 

Crowley cackles.

How irritating. He’d kept up such resolve for this long, the only reason being that he likes to be contrary. He never actually cared whether Crowley managed to take him to a club; he just wanted to win the argument. Now, Aziraphale looks at the stamp on his hand, a blue smudge saying ‘Attic’. 

At least it’s making Crowley laugh. He doesn’t hear that often. “Yes, yes, alright. Now sit up and drink your coffee.” 

Emerging from the blankets, Crowley sits up a little, laughter dwindling. He blows the steam off the cup and takes a gulp. Asbestos mouth. “I can’t believe it.”

“Well, it certainly explains all the clothes.”

That earns a wide-eyed look of confusion. “Clothes? What- oh. Ooooh. Yeah. Yep, I- ugh. I remember.”

“You made me go out in _this_.” 

He’s not wanted to address it yet, because he’s not been awake enough, but he can’t deny it any longer. He’s wearing a white t-shirt. A t-shirt. And it has a design on it, too. Two angel wings. _Diamante. Angel wings._

Crowley chokes on a snort, coffee sloshing precariously. “I didn’t make you wear shit. You chose that out of all the options.”

“It’s ghastly.”

“They all were, I’m a demon, remember?”

“But _Crowley_ ,” he whines ineffectually. He may as well stomp his feet and slam the door in a strop. “What if people saw?”

He’s plumping up a cushion to lean on when he says, “Hate to break it to you, but I reckon a lot of people might have seen us. Even some of our students.”

Aziraphale sinks to the bed, shoulders drooping. And with a sigh, he closes his eyes and regrets. Regrets it all. This whole week, he’d tried to build some sort of name here, he’d actually started enjoying his job. And now this. 

“What do you remember?” he asks. 

Crowley exhales through pursed lips, cradling his mug and snug under the duvet. “Bugger all, if I’m honest.”

With another sigh, Aziraphale leans his elbows on his knees and hangs his head- not a typical stance he ever adopts. “Well. This is what I’m starting to remember.” 

He was on the phone to Madame Tracy- or, Tracy, as she’d asked him to call her. She’d rung to ask him how it was all going, since the two of them had become unlikely friends after it all happened. Aziraphale was at his desk, looking out of the window into the courtyard of Corpus Christi. The weather was thinking about snowing, but it wasn’t quite cold enough to, yet. And he remembers the sound of people’s shoes knocking against parquet floors. He remembers how dark his wood-panelled room looked, compared to the white-winter light outside. 

What he’s not going to tell Crowley, now, are the precise details of the conversation he was having. 

Tracy’s voice was crackly. “I thought you were enjoying it, love. Are you not enjoying it? Lecturing and talking about all those lovely things you’ve learned over the years? How many was it?”

“Roughly six thousand,” he said quite informatively.

“Of course. Sorry, a lady shouldn’t really ask those things.” She made a prim little cough, which usually means she wants to press the subject forward into territory that will make Aziraphale wriggle uncomfortably. “So, what is it that’s on your mind, then, sweetheart?”

And, of course, he didn’t reply. Because he didn’t know what to say, even if he’d wanted to tell her the truth. How do you say that your hereditary enemy is making the experience tense- not because he’s your enemy, but because you love him? 

“Do you love him?”

And yes, he marvelled at Tracy’s perception at that moment. Even on the phone, she sensed his confusion and distress. “How did you know?”

“There’s only one thing that makes someone this tongue tied,” she said affectionately, maternally. Which is absurd, considering their age gap. “Now, you didn’t answer my question. Do you?”

“Yes. No- yes. Oh, of course I do, but... I don't know. Sometimes it’s difficult, Tracy. I can see other people’s love clear as day- but my own? I’m afraid I can’t see the wood for the trees.”

“Ah, now, I know the answer to that one.”

Aziraphale had been staring out of the window the whole time- the old, warped glass making the start of the snowfall look mythical. “Oh?”

“You’re afraid of something. You’re scared of being in love, so there’s a bit of you trying not to feel it. What is it you’re afraid of?”

As previously stated, Aziraphale isn’t telling Crowley any of this as he looks back on it now, but it’s hard not to let the conversation pour into his head. Because he’s never met anyone quite so astute. Tracy isn’t a psychiatrist by any means, but she is human, so it appears she knows how feelings work better than Aziraphale. “I suppose... it’s always been my colleagues.”

“Yes, that person at the airfield seemed a bit fierce, didn’t he. They were all so rude.”

“To say the least.”

“Right, so you’re in love with him.”

“Yes,” he answered with certainty. 

“But you said you weren’t sure just now because you’re scared of something.”

He’d thought about expanding. It’s not just Heaven he’s scared of- not now, after what happened at Armageddon. No, some part of him is afraid of anyone getting close enough to exploit him, as Heaven has done. Of course, Crowley never would; he trusts him more than anyone. And yet, that fear is still there, reeling him in. Irrational, but there. Familiar fear. Almost reliable. 

But he doesn’t tell her that. Tracy doesn’t need to know everything. 

“Yes,” he replied, in the end. “But I don’t know what to do now. I love him, and I’m fairly certain he has feelings for me. And… things are going well. They don’t need to change. But it feels as if something is… missing.”

There’d been a pause, the sound of the phone’s reception and people talking in the corridor outside. The smell of books and the winter light filled him. He remembers a feeling of home. 

“What is it that you feel’s missing, love? You know, it sounds an awful lot as if you’re in a relationship already.”

“Well. Well, perhaps we are. But this is how we’ve always been- we’ve danced around the subject until we’re dizzy, never spoken about things, and… I don’t know if I can do that this time. I need something real. I need it to be…”

He trailed off. He didn’t really want to expand. Or, he didn’t know how to. 

“To be…?” Tracy prompted. 

He huffed, rubbing his forehead. “I wish it were more…”

“More...?”

He cleared his throat, suddenly getting hot in the face. “E…”

“E…?”

“Explicit.”

A pause. A gasp. “Oh, Mr Fell.”

Alarm struck. “Oh Lord- no! Oh, not like that. I only mean, more… spoken aloud. More open and honest, nothing to hide, saying how we really feel. You know- so there’s no misunderstandings, no shame. I want to tell him how I feel and... to hear him say it.” Oh, the idea of saying ‘I love you aloud’, of hearing it said back in words instead of lingering hand brushes. It made him smile dizzily. It took his breath away. Then he thought on Tracy’s shock, and the heat in his cheeks turned even hotter. “Although…”

Another gasp. “Oh _Mr Fell_ -”

It was then that Crowley had opted to come in, much to his horror. He’d probably been staring at him in utter despair, hand on the phone and mouth hanging open. Crowley slung himself in with his usual swaying hips, watching him with amusement, blissfully unaware. 

“Tracy- I must go, do take care-”

“When you get back to London, you and I must go shopping in Ann Summers and-”

“Goodbye!”

He slammed the phone down. Crowley had raised his eyebrows. 

“That sounded a bit heated.”

“Not at all, you know Tracy, aha, very, er, spirited- can I help you, my dear?”

Crowley had stared at him for a moment longer, then gave up pressing the topic. Thank the Lord. “Yeah, Adam’s friend, er… what’s his name. Red Leicester. Cheddar. Stilton?”

“Wensleydale.”

“Knew he was a cheese. Yeah, he came bounding up to me announcing that Adam was going clubbing tonight and that we should know. In case we wanted to keep an eye out.”

Aziraphale shivered. “No, thank you.”

“Obviously not your thing- thought you’d say that. But, er, _what say you_ to a spot of Merlot this evening? And a few movies?”

And he knew at the time it wasn’t a date, those evenings never are, but it had made him squirm happily inside nonetheless. “Yes, that sounds just about perfect. I’ll see you at home later tonight- I need to do some marking.”

“Don’t be daft, do it tomorrow. Let’s go now.”

“Ah,” Crowley says now. Wrinkling his nose. “Yeah, that’s when it started.”

“I could have been in my office, peacefully marking essays on Augustinian poetry.” Aziraphale is sat under the covers beside Crowley now, cup of tea poised at his lips. “I could have my marking _done_ by now, but as it is I’ll have to do it today. Feeling like this.”

“Yeah, alright, I’m sorry. Just, keep going. Refresh my memory.”

And so they’d returned to the flat, opened a bottle or two. Well, it actually turned out to be three. Or was it four-?

“It was four,” Crowley interrupts.

-They’d opened a bottle or four. It started out as a perfectly reasonable Friday night. Crowley had found some terrible reality TV programme called 'Love Island', threatened Aziraphale with watching it before taking pity. They’d found a couple of movies to watch, neither of one of them paying much attention. Movie nights tend to mean heckling and talking over the film about something else. And at some point, the wine had simply gone straight to their heads. 

Crowley had received a text message from Adam’s phone, written by Wensleydale, reporting that Adam was getting too drunk and was putting on a strop when The Them suggested going home. Pepper and Brian apparently had given up and voted to leave Adam to it, if he was going to be so moody and defiant. The 'see if we care' approach. Wensleydale opposed the vote and said in his text that ‘being his guardian angels, if you can persuade him NOT to have one more sambuca shot, that would actually be really helpful’. 

“That s’not good,” Crowley slurred.

“Oh, he’s fine, I'm sure! Just fine. Drunken escapades! Is all.” Aziraphale, laid lengthways on the sofa, arms splayed. Not terribly dignified. 

“But, think, think, angel,” Crowley babbles, “it all- all starts this way, dunnit? They- antichrist thinks he’ll just have another shot, then, gets all arsey and ignores his friends, then decides to rule the world! Next thing you know it’ll be fire and brimstone and the sea will be fish soup again. Or, not again, ‘cause, it wasn’t in the first place, but it’ll happen, ‘Ziraphale, fish soup will happen.”

He’d pouted, rubbing his face. “Noooo…”

“And course, could just be he’s-” a hiccup, “-he’s being stroppy ‘cause he’s drunk and there’s nothing more to it-”

“Yes,” Aziraphale said with relief.

“I mean, you turn into a proper know-it-all when you’re drunk, so, so, anything’s possible, isnit?”

Aziraphale couldn’t argue with that. 

“But you never know, and never knowing is bad because I like knowing and I like apples, even if it’s an evil apple on an evil tree, so we should… go. Should go. Club. Go club. Club time. Yes! Club!”

“No,” he pouted again. 

“Oh come ooooon. Come on come on come on. It’s fun and dancing, just- dancing fun.”

He remembers now. He remembers sitting there and, quite frankly, being relieved. He had been relieved at the time that he was drunk enough to not have to argue. Because he _did_ want to go, and this was the perfect opportunity to ‘give in’. He likes winning arguments, but this time, he hadn’t wanted to even try. 

“Where is this _club_?”

Crowley had crawled along the sofa towards Aziraphale- which meant that he was almost lying on him- and even at the time, that had made him almost spontaneously combust. Right now, the memory is making his chest flutter. And Crowley’s biting the inside of his cheek, lips twisted. 

Anyway, what had happened was that Crowley had crawled over to Aziraphale, Aziraphale had laid very still, and Crowley’d said: “Very sordid. Very debauched. You sure you want to go?”

“Yes,” he’d replied in a sudden bout of bravery, “Let’s go. Now.”

And then they’d spent about an hour getting ready. Crowley conjuring all sorts of awful clothes. 

“They weren’t all that bad,” he complains now.

Aziraphale nibbles at the corner of a brioche roll gingerly. Then, “Yes, I’m afraid they were. You admitted they were. The evidence is all over the living room floor, my dear.”

Crowley had opted for a dress and absurdly high heels. And he vaguely remembers asking what pronouns Crowley’d prefer for the evening, and Crowley had replied with a shrug. Crowley cares about the so-called gender binary about as much as any other celestial being does- fallen or not. Which is, not very much at all. 

So they’d somehow got to the club. Aziraphale thinks they must have walked, because Crowley doesn’t like cabs. So they’d stumbled to this club- if anyone asked him where it is now, he wouldn’t be able to give directions-

“It’s on Park End Street.”

Aziraphale sighs, eyes closed in impatience. “Would you please stop interrupting me?”

Crowley holds his hands up in defence, but doesn’t argue. 

They’d found their way to Park End Street- apparently- and joined a very long queue. Aziraphale remembers a group of drunk men in front of them trying to flirt with Crowley, and Crowley taking off one of his heels threateningly. The bouncer hadn’t noticed (unfortunately, otherwise they would never have made it in). So they’d wobbled through, Lord knows why they hadn’t miracled themselves to the front- and Aziraphale had spent a lot of it talking with some ladies on a hen do, complimenting their outfits and sharing unnecessarily personal life stories. He remembers telling them all that they were beautiful, and he’d only narrowly avoided getting a selfie with them. 

“That’s not how I remember it,” Crowley says. He’s sat on the other end of the bed now, so they’re head-to-toe. 

Aziraphale looks up from his second cup of tea. “What?”

“Not what I remember. I remember you asking them to take a picture of _us_. With my phone.”

His mouth hangs open. All of this- clubbing, dressing up, selfies- it seems so unlike him. All seems completely incredible. “I’m sorry?”

“No, really, wait, there must be…” Crowley leans down to the floor, where his phone had been cast in disregard last night. It only takes a second for him to start cackling. 

“Oh, no, please,” Aziraphale begs.

“Yep.” He turns the phone in his direction.

The image does not bear description.

“You must get rid of it.”

“Pah! Fat chance! I’m saving this forever and ever!”

“No-”

Thus ensues a half-hearted wrestle to grab the phone. Eventually, Aziraphale realises he must accept his fate, and continue remembering what happened last night. Even if he were to win the fight-for-the-phone, he wouldn’t know how to delete the blasted thing. 

“Fine. Now, will you let me continue?”

Crowley waves his hand in a semi-courtesy. 

They had somehow, probably miraculously, managed to persuade the bouncers to let them in. Aziraphale doesn’t remember the music at all, other than that it was awful. The sort of bass that sounds like a cat trying to be sick. And there had been a moment when he’d stopped by the cloakroom- stag dos and hen dos streaming around him, students crying drunkenly- and he’d re-evaluated his choice to come out. Stood in the lights of the club, bleary eyed and blinking out of time, in a diamante angel-wing t-shirt. 

But then Crowley had wobbled over in his heels and dragged him further into the club by the hand, and Aziraphale must have forgotten about any hesitation because he knows for a fact that he’d drunk a lot more after that. 

The mission, of course, was to find Adam, and that took far too long. Two tequila shots later- he can still taste the alcohol now, over the sweet notes of his breakfast brioche- they found Adam at the bar with Rugby Lad.

“Sorry, it occurs to me-” Aziraphale digresses.

“Ah, now who’s interrupting?” 

“I have no idea why that boy was called Rugby Lad.”

Crowley sits on the sofa, a sequin dress draped behind him that he’d almost chosen to wear. They’ve transferred themselves to the living room, both of them having regained enough energy to sober up properly. They are both feeling, thankfully, much better- memory of last night still poor, however. 

“Ah, he’s in my first year Philosophy class. With Adam. Why? Did I-?”

“You kept telling me to call him that. He and Adam were trying to tell me his name, and you just spoke over them and said he was called Rugby Lad.”

Crowley rubs his forehead with his thumb and forefinger, shielding his eyes. “Did I, now.”

“Yes. Anyway, I don’t remember at all what we said to Adam.”

“I remember bits from here, I was, er, beginning to sober up.”

Aziraphale scoffs, curled up on the sofa. “I certainly was _not_.”

“Right, well, it sort of goes along the lines of- Adam didn’t like us being there, which is. Hm. Yeah, fair enough, really, bit embarrassing. So we took the conversation to the smoking area, where I think we started off asking if he was OK, if he was having any thoughts of destroying the world. But then someone- fuck knows who- they offered me a cigarette, just me, and you got stroppy and rolled your eyes because he was rude enough to ignore you, silly sod that you are. So he offered all three of us one each.”

“Oh God,” Aziraphale pulls his tartan blanket over his head.

“Which is the first cigarette you’ve had in. What?”

“Fifty-two years,” Aziraphale admits. Pulling the blanket away so he can see Crowley’s amusement, “I didn’t know how bad they were for humans, then. I thought it was just another harmless little indulgence, how was I to know that I was setting a bad example?”

Of course, the fact that Aziraphale, as an angel, shouldn’t be dabbling in _any_ sort of indulgence is neither here nor there. They both know it, so there’s no point in bringing it up. 

“So, I suppose what happens then is we finish our cigarettes and head home. Adam did, we put him in a cab. Remember that much.”

Not very good Godparents, either of them. And not very good guardian angels. No, Godparents and guardian angels don’t check up on their ward in a club to drag them home, only to join them. Out-drink them. However, aside from that, something about this story feels incomplete. Aziraphale frowns to himself in thought, whilst Crowley miracles the mess of the room away and begins obsessively straightening the cushions on the sofa. 

“I have a feeling we didn’t go home at that point,” Aziraphale ventures uneasily.

Crowley turns around from where he’s rearranging the pile of books on Aziraphale’s coffee table. Still in his matching PJs. “What?”

“I have a terrible feeling…” Aziraphale pauses. And the memory dawns on him like a particularly horrible dawn. A dawn that’s misty and rainy and miserable. 

“Aziraphale.”

“I have a feeling I ran into some of my students.”

Crowley stares at him. Then, nodding his head from side to side in acceptance. “Yeah, I s’pose that’s not unlikely… fuck.”

He falls onto the sofa. Aziraphale rubs his face, sinks into his seat in embarrassment. “Oh Lord.”

“Don’t ‘oh Lord’, it’ll be fine. Probably just make the front page of the student magazine- and no one reads those things anyway, so we’re alright. _New Lecturers Have a Royal Piss-Up and Make Thorough Tits of Themselves_. That sort of thing. Nothing we didn’t already know about ourselves.”

Aziraphale sighs. “We saved the world. So I suppose we saved humanity’s right to scrawl utter filth about us on the Online.”

“Online, just- just online, not on the online.”

“On the internet?”

“On the internet.”

For a moment, they simply sit beside each other and consider what they have just relived. Then, Aziraphale finds himself laughing. The sort of laugh that hurts his face with the size of his smile. 

Crowley leans away to view him, a wry smile. “What?”

“Nothing, my dear, really,” he says once he’s caught his breath. He wipes a tear away, leans against the arm of the sofa and looks at his best friend. “Only sometimes I wonder whether we’ll ever grow up.”

That makes him beam. That huge smile that makes Aziraphale think he’ll suddenly pop fangs. “I hope not.”

The time, as it turns out, is three o’clock. Which explains why Aziraphale is famished. He rustles up some good bread and even better cheese, and they sit and listen to Radio 4 for some time. _Just a Minute_ plays, and they both have a go at playing the game themselves. It’s mid-February, and they watch the neon-orange and pink sunset through the flat’s sash windows. The sound of bike bells tinging on the streets. Aziraphale’s satchel bag of essays to mark, hanging by the door. His old copy of _Ars Amatoria_ , opened on his coffee table. The grandfather clock chiming. The low, nostalgic sound of the radio. 

The steam of his umpteenth cup of tea in his hands. Crowley, lying on the sofa. His raised knees in the way of the view of his face. Aziraphale peers around them, sees that Crowley has fallen asleep. 

Aziraphale doesn’t often witness this- Crowley, sans glasses, eyes closed. No longer defensive, fragile- just vulnerable. When he has done, he has savoured it in the best way he can. In the old days, he would paint a mental picture. Now, photographs exist, and he has found an even better analogy of capturing a moment. He takes a mental photograph and presses it in his internal photo album. 

At some point, he must doze off. When he wakes up, Crowley is watching ‘Love Island’. 

“Oh, God,” Aziraphale grumbles.

“Alright, alright, keep your knickers on.” He switches the channel, and an old black and white movie appears. “There, more up your street, I’m assuming?”

Aziraphale doesn’t answer. He rubs his face sleepily, sits up a little, but not much. He finds that, even sobered up, he still feels exhausted. Miracles can’t cure everything. 

Suddenly overwhelmed by the injustice of this, he sighs. 

“What is it.” Crowley has a skill of asking questions like he isn’t really asking questions, more like making a weary statement. 

Aziraphale feels himself pouting.

“What is it- you’re making that face.”

He glares. “What face?”

Brows shoot up. “The face you make when you want something but you’re in too bad a mood to actually ask for it.”

“I don’t have a face,” he says, fully knowing he does. 

“Spit it out, angel.” Crowley, yellow eyes kind and forgiving. Even with the mocking, even with the bravado and bristling. 

He utters one more sigh. Then, “I want Chinese food.”

Ten minutes later, thanks to the 'app' on Crowley's phone, they’re eating Chinese food. 

Aziraphale realises how inappropriate the noises he makes are when he’s eating, and he takes great satisfaction in it. “ _Thank_ you.”

“You’re totally spoiled. And, by the way, don’t thank me, thank Golden Dragon. Good prawn crackers, these. Not as good as the stuff you get in Soho back in London, but still.”

Crowley won’t look at him. It’s a shame, because Aziraphale’s giving him an affectionate look that, for once, he wishes he’d notice.

“You really are an angel.”

Crowley grimaces, and says, mouth full, “ _Shut up.”_

Because Aziraphale really is spoiled, he eats till he falls asleep again. And when he wakes up, he’s leaning against Crowley. 

He sees that it’s gone dark. He sees that the side-lights are on, and that another black and white movie is playing. The food is cleared away. The blanket is draped perfectly over his knees. Crowley’s shoulder is hard and bony, not very comfortable at all, but he’d rather not move. Not yet.

It’s possible that Crowley doesn’t realise he’s awake at all. Aziraphale watches the movie, watches the romantic moments and hears Crowley let out long, measured breaths as he watches. Let out little huffs of amusement at some of the sappier scenes. Sees his hand lying on his lap. 

Angels, as a rule, are strategic. They are methodical, crossing the ts and dotting the is in every situation. They plan out every act, consider the consequence of every move. Aziraphale, on the other hand, is the type of angel to visit Paris during The Revolution for crepes. And brioche. And so, what holds him back in most cases is something other than impulse control; it's that Heaven has had invisible reins on him for millennia. It will take the rest of time to really know to what extent. That doesn’t mean, however, that he can’t take a step closer to understanding who he is without Heaven. A step towards being himself.

Or the outstretch of a hand. 

Aziraphale moves his hand towards Crowley’s. He doesn’t quite hold it; rather, lets his rest beside it, lets his smallest finger graze Crowley’s. It’s simple, quiet, understated, and about as much as he can handle right now. 

He feels Crowley’s shoulders still. He feels his head move to look down at their hands. Only just touching.

“You’re awake, then,” he croaks.

Aziraphale marvels at their hands. Stares and stares at them touching. And the world not ending. Planets aren’t colliding. He’s not falling from Grace. He isn’t sure what he expected. Perhaps for Crowley to move away. But none of that is happening, and instead, there’s this simple little view of their hands touching. So harmless. So surprisingly not-earth-shattering. And it's somehow also the most incredible thing he’s ever seen. 

“You’ve always been there for me,” Aziraphale whispers. 

He feels Crowley stumble on his breath, like he can’t remember how to function his human body. “Well. You were, too. Even when you weren’t, you were.”

“I’m sorry I didn't see it earlier.”

Crowley sighs. He takes Aziraphale’s hand. He watches it all happen, so he knows it’s real. 

“S’fine. It’s hard to feel those things when you’re used to being treated like shit.” Another sigh. “I understand.”

And then, Aziraphale sits up. Looks at Crowley; it’s hard to see him this close. “Yes… I think you do.”

There were times when Aziraphale had thought that ‘love’ meant nothing to Crowley- simply another four letter word. But he sees the meaning of the word in him now. It’s the closest they’ve ever been. Perhaps that shouldn’t mean so much, but it does, and the two of them take a moment to appreciate it. Noses touching. Near enough to hear Crowley breathing. 

If he lets himself close his eyes, he might not see it happen. And if he doesn’t see it, he might fool himself into not believing it, and he can’t risk that, not after how far they’ve come. But Crowley- Crowley’s eyes have fallen closed and he’s softening, melting into the sofa and leaning his forehead against Aziraphale’s and his breaths sound as delicate as snowfall. 

Aziraphale reaches out a hand, lays it against Crowley’s face. Locks of red pouring between his fingers. Crowley’s hand holds his there, runs down his arm. And Aziraphale marvels again- this time, at how much he’d underestimated what Crowley felt for him. 

He leaves his kiss lightly. All it takes is the smallest movement to reach, and all he leaves is a faint whisper of it. Everything is very still. It is probably because neither of them have remembered to breathe. 

Crowley kisses lightly, too. It makes him sigh in surprise. He shouldn’t be surprised, but he is. And he relaxes into the moment at last; feels fingers in his hair; fingers at the back of his neck; ghost lips.

When Crowley pulls away and leans his forehead against Aziraphale’s again, he feels relief. Because he’s not ready for more, not ready for anything else right now. Not without that familiar fear making him go cold, making him slip away and disappear. And Crowley knows- of course he does. Aziraphale believed him when he said he understood. What an amazing thing, that Aziraphale doesn’t even have to ask or explain.

The television is still on. He hadn’t noticed. Aziraphale turns to look at it, taken aback, and miracles it off. Crowley leans away. His hand edging towards Aziraphale’s hesitantly, asking. Aziraphale takes it.

“There’ve been a lot of moments over the past- ooh, I don’t know. Four millennia,” Crowley begins quietly, playing with Aziraphale’s fingers, “When I thought something might happen, and they didn’t. Now definitely wasn’t one of them.”

That makes him laugh. In a sort of ashamed way. “I know. I wasn’t…”

“That’s- no, God, no, that’s not what I meant,” Crowley babbles, tuts to himself, growls to himself, too. “Came out wrong. I never- _expected_. Anything from you, angel. I still don’t. Only sort of, hoped in a pathetic way, from a distance.”

He clears his throat, frowns to himself and fixes his intense gaze at the wall. "Loved you from a distance. Hmm. Yeah."

Aziraphale feels the smile come from his chest and reach his face. He takes a lungfull of air and strokes his thumb across Crowley's knuckles. They both watch it happen. 

“I did, too. Hoped, that is,” he says, sounding fragile. “I love you, Crowley. That word barely covers what I feel for you." Crowley makes a choking noise, stares at Aziraphale like he can't believe it. "But," Aziraphale continues, "it’s been hard for me to see it behind all the cowardice.”

“Fear,” Crowley interrupts, voice firm. “Fear. Not the same as cowardice.”

Aziraphale smiles weakly. “It comes and goes. And it’s much better now that I’m not a part of all that anymore,” he adds, casting his eyes to Heaven. “I’m starting to doubt myself less. It… oh, I know it isn’t an excuse for how I’ve treated you in the past. And it may sound strange…”

“Go on.”

He anchors himself on Crowley’s hand. “It’s felt as if I've not been able to be myself. To be who I am whilst also being a messenger of Heaven never felt possible. It’s often disorienting, and it has made things feel very distant. But… I’m starting to feel myself coming back to the surface. I always do with you.”

The grandfather clock ticks. Their tea has grown cold. Aziraphale traces the lines on Crowley’s palm. 

“You know I almost killed the archangel Gabriel,” Crowley says after a while. 

It makes Aziraphale laugh in surprise. “I’m sorry?”

“Your trial. I was so angry at them I almost killed them. All, covered in hellfire and spewing hellfire and throwing it at them and everything. I was this close to hitting them.”

“It’s probably good that you didn’t.”

“I can’t promise I won’t if I see any of them again.”

Aziraphale smiles sadly. “Tracy would demand to team up with you. She’s made it quite clear that she’s throwing the first punch, and I've hardly told her anything.”

“As if. She’ll have to join the queue.”

He laughs properly now. And he can’t believe it, but he feels tears building, and he feels the pain of it in his throat. He swallows to soothe it, and he’s about to change the subject when he’s brought into an abrupt, very rough hug. 

“Oof,” Aziraphale complains. 

Crowley doesn’t say anything, and makes no attempt to apologise. He simply pulls Aziraphale as tight as possible, burying his face in his collar. Their knees bump together. Aziraphale closes his eyes and sinks into it.

“Look at me, making this all about myself,” he mutters, suddenly ashamed again.

Crowley growls. “ _Stop it._ ”

He laughs. “Alright.”

They hold the hug for a while. It doesn’t stay nearly as bone-crushingly tight, but it remains firm and comforting. Stable and there. 

“‘Sides, I’ve got plenty of depressing shit to unload, too,” Crowley says. “That’s just for another time.”

Aziraphale chuckles, rubbing his back. “I can’t wait.”

“Wouldn’t it be funny,” Crowley says suddenly, face nuzzled in Aziraphale’s jumper, “if She planned all this. If She orchestrated the whole thing. Made up the fuss about Armageddon 2.0, just so we’d come to Oxford and share an apartment together and finally fucking communicate with each other. That’d sort of be funny, wouldn’t it?”

The answer is obvious. _No, that wouldn’t be funny at all!_ Except, it is. It’s absurd, and hilarious, and exactly the sort of thing that would happen to them. So Aziraphale laughs, pulling Crowley closer. And Crowley laughs, pulling him closer. And they both sit there and laugh, laughing like idiots, because the two of them really were ineffable all along.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1) yes, Aziraphale is dealing with the trauma of being in an abusive relationship with Heaven!!!  
> 2) yes, I like the headcanon that they're both Ace!!!  
> 3) Crowley has OCD because I have OCD and I do what i want sjkdlfjasdklaf
> 
> anyway i hope you guys liked this chapter, it's obviously very silly in the first half, i wanted to imagine what would happen if you put them in an absurd situation like that!!! hope you enjoyed it <3


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> thank you so much everyone for reading!

Time passes, as it usually does.

Time is funny that way. When you try not to look at it, it slips around you like a ghost. But if you stare at the clock ticking away, it’ll stare right back, frozen, not going anywhere. These days, they lose grasp of time- the months simply roll by like steam, and Aziraphale becomes a part of Oxford. They both forget that they were only meant to be there for a little while. 

They have lunches and dinners with Adam (though the first one after that night-out had been quite tense. Adam had been quite rightly furious. “You’re both just lucky that you’re so bad at being godparents that you ended up getting drunk with me instead of sending me home. I’d’ve been even more pissed off if that’d happened. As it is, still not cool.” “

“Erm… yes. Sorry about that.”) 

They take walks through the Meadows, Christchurch college poking over the view of the trees. They find a bench in the botanical gardens that becomes one of their favourites. They have a go at punting, both fall in, make a bit of a scene about it, manage to feature in the University student magazine (again). They drink coffee in overrun cafes and shop in overrun bookshops. There is much to miss from London: the bookshop, of course, which Aziraphale visits on the weekends, as well as all the wonderful restaurants that Oxford seems to be missing. But there is also the Cotswolds, here- miles and miles of hills, going on for what feels like forever. They map it out together.

They continue to lecture, pretending that either of them have any real academic merit. It has been difficult to hide their personal experiences in meeting ancient philosophers and poets they are teaching, and in all likelihood, they both sound a little unhinged. But the students enjoy their lectures; their grades seem to improve as they teach, which can’t be a bad thing. They attend faculty wine and cheese nights and ignore all the faculty, paying attention to the wine and cheese. They mark essays in each other’s offices, and as the year passes, the winter sun turns brighter with spring. 

And whilst they have shared all of time together on the same planet, having walked through thousands of the same moments in history, never has Aziraphale felt so settled in a point in time before. The enormity of the universe, the great expanse of time that unrolls before them- as an angel, that has always been quite clear to him. And that sort of awareness makes it hard for Aziraphale to absorb the moment that he is in. Knowing how much more is coming, and what all of it will be. He is no stranger to the philosophy of carpe diem: he’s done plenty of impulsive things knowing that this day will never happen again. But to allow a moment to fold around you, to bathe in it, without thinking of what will come next- without the _fear_ of what will come next- that is something that Aziraphale has never known until now. 

When he is with Crowley, he doesn’t feel the ticking of the universe. His subconscious doesn’t count the moments like sheep. These days, he simply is. He lives in an apartment with Crowley in Oxford. One moment, they will be holding hands on a bench, and he will feel it entirely. No ‘what next? What happens now?’. Instead, it is a feeling of complete peace, a feeling of home that he had never even fathomed. The familiar squirming in his chest replaced with something still, like a leaf on the surface of a pond. 

Aziraphale sits at his desk, daydreaming with a red pen poised at his lip. The last sentence he read was something to do with the colour symbolism in Sappho’s poetry, and whilst it is interesting, it’s nothing he hasn’t heard before; he stares at the courtyard below, students and teachers bending through the warped glass. The flowers are blooming. 

He turns his head at the knock at the door- one he immediately recognises. Crowley dips in languidly, the sound of his shoes turning soft as he steps onto the old, worn rug. Miraculous, how seeing him for the millionth time feels just as wonderful as the last. 

“Good morning,” Aziraphale says, closing his book of Sappho and shoving the essays away.

“Alright. Thought I’d pop in and erm. Yep.” Crowley slips his hands into his negligible pockets and wanders further into the room.

Aziraphale narrows his eyes. “You’re acting rather shifty.”

“Shifty? Me? I’ve- nah, never been shifty in my life, what’re you saying.”

He looks at Crowley expectantly, calmly. Crowley sags and sighs with his usual dramatic flare. 

“Yeah, I’ve, done a thing. Not sure if you’ll like the thing, but I’ve done a thing, and I thought I’d, well, show you the thing. Once you’ve finished…” he waves dismissively at Aziraphale’s marking. “This thing.”

Aziraphale sits up in his seat with a smile. “Oh? How mysterious.”

“It’s- don’t get too excited, but, uhm.” 

Crowley doesn’t finish his sentence. He slowly makes his way to Aziraphale’s side of the desk and stands there, reaching for Aziraphale’s hand. Even after months, there’s a self-consciousness to the action, and Aziraphale takes his hand gladly. Looking up at him, Crowley fits perfectly into Aziraphale’s world. It will take Aziraphale some time for him to forgive himself for taking so long to see it. He stands up, one hand in Crowleys, one on his cheek.

“I love you very much, my dear.”

If Aziraphale says it enough times, maybe Crowley will look like he believes it. Well, they have all the time in the world, he thinks. “Love you too, angel.”

He lays a single, soft kiss on his lips. When he pulls away, the smallest distance, he feels Crowley breathe out. Their noses touch.

“Now,” Aziraphale says quietly. He revels in the feeling of knowing how undone it makes Crowley when he kisses him. “What is this thing you’d like to show-?”

There’s another knock at the door. Aziraphale’s hands are still all over Crowley when the person enters.

“Aziraphale- we need to have a little…”

Aziraphale sees the archangel Gabriel standing in his office doorway. The two of them stare at each other. Crowley stays frozen on the spot, an angel’s hand on his cheek, a nice blush across both of them. 

“... talk,” Gabriel finishes slowly. 

Crowely steps back. Aziraphale mirrors him. 

“Oh- _hello_ \- hello Gabriel,” Aziraphale says. He casts an anxious glance towards Crowley, who’s now leaning against the wall with a terrible attempt at nonchalance. With his hands fiddling nervously with each other, Aziraphale continues, “What a pleasure to see you here- let me- let me explain. You see- my, er, _wily nemesis_... well, things have changed a little since we last-”

Gabriel closes his eyes and holds up his hands to stop him. Aziraphale’s words falter. 

“I really. _Really_ do not want to know.”

Aziraphale deflates. He looks at Crowley, who’s grinning smugly from ear to ear- and starts laughing. 

“Ah. Alright,” Aziraphale breathes.

“I only came to ask what in the Hell you’re doing here. In Oxford, with the antichrist. But,” Gabriel continues, “Yeah. I can see that you’re… hard at work.”

“You did fire me. I believe I’m free to do as I will,” Aziraphale replies immediately, and is shocked by his own impertinence. 

Gabriel raises his eyebrows as if he’s shocked too. “ _Anyway_. I am here to let you know that there has been a bit of a- misunderstanding. Regarding the second apocalypse.”

The archangel purses his lips awkwardly. Crowley is still laughing. 

“It seems that intel was a bit… skewed.”

“Does that mean that Hell are calling back the cavalry too?” Aziraphale asks.

“I believe so. The grapevine wasn’t so reliable as we’d-” Gabriel stops and stares at Crowley, who’s leaning against the wall and cackling. Gabriel smirks at him dangerously. “Hi. Demon Crowley, was it?”

Crowley clears his throat, composes himself- dives forward with a hand extended. “Oh, yes, sorry, how rude of me not to formally introduce myself. Demon Crowley’s my name. Sort of. Most people just call me Crowley.”

Gabriel sneers at Crowley’s hand, doesn’t shake it. He looks at it in much the same way as he views food, whenever he catches Aziraphale eating. 

Retracting his hand, Crowley takes Aziraphale’s side again, body waving from side to side- a sign that he’s feeling very pleased with himself. Quite frankly, Aziraphale is very pleased with him, too. If there’s one thing that Gabriel hates, it’s not being taken seriously. It feels as if Crowley has observed that, and that makes Aziraphale want to give him a big, messy kiss.

Instead, Aziraphale takes his hand.

Gabriel takes a second to view the scene, eyes scanning them up and down. He stands there with a straight back, poised and cold; grey suit blending into the worn-grey rug; so still that one could almost forget he’s there. A predator, camouflaging.

“Right,” Gabriel says, face barely moving, still staring at their hands. “I’ll… leave you to whatever this is. Again, I do _not_ want to know.”

He turns to leave. Aziraphale and Crowley share a glance. 

“So,” Aziraphale calls. “You’re not going to… punish me? Cast me down?”

Gabriel’s back is turned. He pauses at the door. He is deadly still- in some way, he reminds Aziraphale of a wild cat. But not entirely. He isn’t alive enough. 

His head turns a little to view them. “No, _Professor Fell_. What would it do to punish you? Especially when-”

Gabriel doesn’t finish his sentence. He somehow tenses further, realising his mistake; he’s just reminded Aziraphale of the fact that Heaven _can’t_ punish them, even if they want to. And then he dives out of the office. 

Aziraphale and Crowley stand hand in hand, watching the closed door for a moment. Then they look at each other. 

Crowley isn’t grinning anymore. It’s a barely there smile that’s somehow brighter than any grin. 

“Let me show you the thing.”

Crowley opens the car door for Aziraphale. He drives them into the Cotswolds as if this is just another day, when it really, really isn’t. His stomach is all jumbled like a fallen game of jenga. 

Spring is fully in bloom. The clouds pass in front of the sun like a Monet painting. Crowley takes the small, winding roads with his hands tight on the wheel. Aziraphale is chattering about all sorts of nonsense, which is just the way he likes it. He loves listening to him any day, but especially now, when he’d like to distract himself from the impending feelings of-

 _ohgod oh FUCK oh God oh Christing fucking Hell_ -

-and so Crowley takes the little country road turns, his Bentley complaining. He chastises it mentally, baring his teeth. 

He’s accidentally taken a different road to the one he’d meant to. But if he remembers rightly, he needs to go past the farm- which he just has, on his left- keep going down the road, emerge over the dip. The blue gate should be on their right, and then it’s the third house on the left. Crowley counts the houses under his breath, and Aziraphale goes quiet, looking at Crowley and out of the window quizzically.

And there it is. The car comes to a creep, and they turn a tight corner into a gravelled parking area. A square, limestone cottage with a thatched roof. The sun is setting behind it, refracting the light so he’s wincing, until he stops the card in the shade of the house. The view of the hills behind it goes on forever, little white blobs of sheep dotted about here and there. Wisteria hugs the East facing side, and rose bushes dance in the wind beneath the windows. The garden needs a bit of care, but he thinks he’ll manage. 

Crowley takes a slow breath. He feels Aziraphale looking at him.

“Crowley?”

“Hang on.”

Crowley dives out of the car, escapes the building tension that he can’t quite cope with. Not unless he wants his voice to break and the waterworks to start, which he’s been doing increasingly around Aziraphale recently. Mortifying. The gravel crunches beneath his shoes as he goes to open Aziraphale’s door. He always lets Crowley do these things, particularly now- Aziraphale likes to humour him, but it’s also largely because he _likes_ Crowley doing things for him. That’s part of the reason he makes these little gestures in the first place. 

Aziraphale steps out of the car. His hair flutters in the breeze a little; he fits in with the spring dandelions and clouds. There’s a soft, lip-parted look of awe on his face. Crowley thinks he’s seen it before, when he handed over a briefcase of books all those years ago. 

“What is this, Crowley?”

And oh Christ, that’s not good, because he sounds like he’s trying not to cry. Which is absolutely not good for Crowley, who was already struggling to hold it together.

He clears his throat. Turns and looks at the house. Then, “Shall we?”

He saunters, as well as he can, towards the front door. Under the flower pot he finds the key- he opens the door, old and painted pale blue. The house is cool; the flagstones are worn; the staircase a little crooked and painted white. He steps further inside to let Aziraphale in. And if he turns to look at Aziraphale, he _will_ cry, so he powers on.

“Kitchen,” he announces impartially, as he steps into said kitchen. There’s a large island, cabinets filled with mismatching mugs left by the previous owner. The sink is deep, and the window behind it offers a view of the neighbouring village, half a mile down the road. The spire of the church pokes above the hedges. 

He hears Aziraphale take in a little breath- hears his soft footfalls as he looks around. 

“Crowley…”

“Living room’s round here.”

He makes his escape once again, pushing open the door to the living room. The fireplace is unlit and large. Although without furniture, it doesn’t feel empty. It feels full of history. A large room, plenty of space for a piano. 

“Oh… this is…”

He knows what he’s about to say. He can feel the love in this place. That’d probably be his fault, because he’d come across this place whilst casually browsing online, had a look around the other day, then fallen in love with the idea of them living here. It probably stinks of Crowley’s love. Just- love all over the place. And that’s aside from the fact that it’s easy to tell that generations of happy families have lived here. 

“Yep. Best till last.”

He clears his throat, leads Aziraphale down the hallway towards the last room downstairs. They can have a look at the rest later, but he needs to show Aziraphale this one room. 

“My dear, slow down-”

“Nope.”

He opens the double doors and turns the corner. Leans against the wall- hiding, he supposes. No: he doesn’t suppose. He knows he’s hiding, because out of all the things he’s ever done, demonic or otherwise, this is the most reckless. 

Aziraphale finally steps into the room. There isn’t an intake of breath this time; there’s no sound at all. It’s painfully quiet, and Crowley chews his lip as he watches. This room is empty too, but he can see Aziraphale standing in here on a Sunday morning, the sun coming in through the East-facing window (once he’s stripped back the wysteria) and perusing the shelves. Shelves and shelves and shelves of books. He can see them now, and he imagines that Aziraphale can imagine it too. The stone floors will want a rug, to warm it up a bit. And the shelves are painted white- it might look nicer if the paint was stripped back to show the original oak. And the window frames could do with a lick of colour. Or something. 

Crowley’s surprising himself with how much his flare for design is coming back. On a slightly smaller scale of course- windowsills, rather than constellations. 

“A library,” Aziraphale says lightly. 

Crowley doesn’t say anything. He folds his arms across his chest and watches Aziraphale through his sunglasses. His back is turned, and his arms are at his sides, and he’s gazing about the room like he’s sleep walking. 

“Do you…” Crowley clears his throat. “D’you like it? I mean. If you like it we can buy it. It’s on the market. And, you know, you were saying how you’d like to stay in Oxfordshire. But how you like the Cotswolds because you miss the countryside, and this is ideal, isn’t it, ‘cause it’s just down the road from Oxford and there’s a train directly to London if we want to do dinner. There’s even a little bookshop in town that looks like it’s looking for a new owner. Not because of me, I didn’t do anything demonic there, it just happened to be available. In case you were wondering.”

Crowley shuts up. Aziraphale turns around. His eyes are huge and red and he’s wearing a shaky smile. 

That makes him chew his lip again, just to stop it from wobbling. “Not a big deal, angel…”

“Crowley.”

He holds out his arms. Crowley could never deny the urge to fall into them. He pushes himself off the wall and lets Aziraphale wrap him up. 

“Do you really mean it?”

Crowley props his chin on Aziraphale’s shoulder. His head bobs when he talks. “Only if you don’t mind moving your books here. Don’t know if you want to keep lecturing or buy that little bookshop in town, but I thought I’d show you, in case...”

“I can just imagine it.”

He steps back, hands on Crowley’s shoulders. His gaze floats around the room. 

“Needs a bit of fixing-up,” Crowley croaks. Ah, shit, his voice is cracking, now. Excellent. He clears his throat. “If you want to put in the miracle-work.”

“Oh, no,” Aziraphale smiles. “I think some old-fashioned elbow grease might be needed here.”

“Really? You, putting in actual work?”

“Ex _cuse_ me.”

Crowley chuckles. But he thinks he knows what Aziraphale’s getting at- the idea of them painting walls with paint rollers and arguing with each other about getting paint on the floor. Somehow, as messy as it sounds, it also seems just right. “Elbow grease sounds good.”

They stand in the middle of the empty library, Crowley winding an arm around Aziraphale’s back. They watch the sun lower in the sky, casting a yellow light. They sit in the moment, appreciate it; the house won’t look this empty again. 

“So?” Crowley asks, finally finding some composure. “Feel like home to you?”

Aziraphale looks at him, brows knit and trying not to cry again. Which sets Crowley off- he blinks the tears out of his eyes. 

“Of course. With you here,” he replies dreamily.

Crowley purses his lips, breathes deeply. No use, the tears are coming now. “For God’s sake, stop it. You soft bastard.”

Aziraphale gives him his brightest smile, wipes the tears from Crowley’s cheeks. Crowley takes off his glasses, rubs his eyes. And without his glasses, he sees it all as clear as day. Aziraphale, an empty house that’s theirs, and another day ending. 

A four letter word doesn’t cover it.

**Author's Note:**

> i hope you're enjoying this! come find me on tumblr at justkeeptrekkin!


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